Compers who attended the Comp Pride meeting in Derby on Saturday 14th July helped raise over £3,200 for Rainbows, the East Midlands Children’s Hospice. Attendees to the event also collected hundreds of books, DVDs, CDs and vidoes for the Derby Breathe Easy Support Group to sell on at their stall to raise much needed funds! Congratulations to the organisers for a successful event. If you’re interested (and perhaps feel like being inspired) one of the organisers of Comp Pride appears in an East Midlands news report and discusses her success as a comper (see below).
Have you received anything from The Winners Club? If yes and you’ve been tempted to take up their offer of “your prize” then a quick read of a recent ‘Investigates’ article from The Mirror is in order. The article explains how The Mirror decided to take up the offer of the prize via the postal option as opposed to a premium rate phone line. They were then asked to pay £6.50 for their prize allocation, which was a 100,000 pixel camera.
The Mirror put the prize in perspective by comparing it to a basic Nikon Coolpix camera that has six million pixels. We decided to go one better and try and find a 100,000 pixel camera and find out how much it was worth. A quick search and we found various 100k pixel cameras on eBay ranging in price from £3 to an optimistic £14.99!
The Mirror are not the first paper to report on The Winners Club, who are based in Banbury, Oxfordshire! Back in 2006 The Guardian mentions them in a similar article. Their advice is quite simple: “bin this” and we fully agree.
Remember if you have to pay to receive a prize - it’s not really a prize! Don’t be tempted to phone up premium rate phone lines on the basis that a leaflet in your newspaper has said you might have won a prize or if you’ve received a letter saying you might have won £10000! Follow The Guardian’s advice and put it in the bin or recycling bag!
Following the revelations about the You Say, We Pay competition that featured on Channel 4’s Richard and Judy program, ICTSTIS, the regulatory body for premium rate telecommunications, has imposed a £150,000 fine on Eckoh Ltd, the provider of the service. The ajudication arose after it was discovered that viewers were encouraged to enter the You Say, We Pay competition after the potential winners had already been selected.
The full ajudication can be read at ICSTIS whilst a response to the fine has also been published online by Eckoh Ltd.
Eckoh’s response explains how the competition worked: The competition started at 5pm and concluded just before 5.45pm. “Eckoh selected 24 participants (in four tranches of six) randomly from those who had called and answered the question correctly and passed these names on to the production company, Cactus. Cactus would then select a winner and telephone them back to validate their details before they were heard on air. In practice, all 24 names had usually been sent to Cactus by about 5.15pm. However, the lines would still be open for another 20 minutes or so”.
They also claim that they discovered the problem, but the production company failed to take appropriate action: “despite the seriousness of the issue and Eckoh following up on this on two further occasions, Eckoh was unsuccessful in having the issue resolved”!
For those of you wanting to read more about the scale of the scandal then The Telegraph provides some very interesting reading. According to the report up to 2.6million calls will need to be refunded - and that accounts for almost half of all entries made to the competition!
ICSTIS are now considering referring the case to Ofcom. Ofcom recently imposed a £300,000 fine on Five regarding irregularities involving their Brainteaser competition, and if they get involved in this case a much higher fine could be served on Channel 4.
We’re always on the look out for fun competitions that perhaps may be low entry and once again it’s an upload competition that’s caught the eye. Gadget store I Want One of Those have launched the IWOOTs - their own little award - and they’re looking for contributions in the form of photos, videos, reviews and ‘things they don’t know’!
The prizes are pretty good too - and includes a 42in LCD TV, Camcorder Package, Digital Camera, Blackberry Mobile and IWOOT vouchers. All winners (in a number of categories) also get a coveted IWOOT award.
The easiest section to enter is probably the “Things We Didn’t Know” - for this they’re looking for some obscure fact. However, it does require originality and do whilst being the easiest to enter, it may well be the hardest to win!
Product review competitions are always low entry! Mainly because people have to have the product and then find the time to create a good quality review. However, if you’re good at writing and can put together something that’s quirky, weird or amusing then there’s a few nice prizes up for grabs.
Most people have a camera, so the photo section may prove to be quite popular. If you have an IWOOT product then start thinking how you can use it to create a cool photo. My own entry - Duckpool Illuminations - is in there and hopefully you’ll be inspired to enter too.
The section with the fewest entries is expected to be the movie section. Already there are some pretty good entries, but don’t let that deter you. Reservoir Elvis and Reservoir Ducks did take some time to devise, record and edit, but was all done in a few hours using a Camcorder and Windows Movie Maker. Most of that time involved getting ducks to “act” accordingly!
In short, this is a fun competition, and whilst it may take you a bit longer to conjure up your entry than say a standard send in your details free prize draw, a good comper knows that it’s the low entry competitions that often yield the big prizes!
Channel 5 have been fined an astonishing £300,000 for faking winners on the popular daily competition Brainteaser. Following the issues regarding Richard & Judy’s TV competitions, “Channel 5 informed Ofcom of five viewer competitions between January and March 2007 where ‘winners’ announced on the programme were either fictitious names or members of the production staff. In each of the competitions, viewers were required to rearrange a group of letters appearing on screen”. These were investigated by Ofcom and they announded their findings on June 26th.
According to This Is Money “Ofcom found 11 further similar or identical instances of unfair competitions in Brainteaser and its spin-off programme Memory Bank”. Whilst the fine is the biggest ever handed out by Ofcom, Five are not going to appeal, although they “are disappointed with the very high level of the financial penalty imposed”. The channel must broadcast two statements about the findings too. Both Brainteaser and Memory Bank have now ended (Out-law).
Again this is another step in ensuring that competitions are run fairly, and the fine is a warning to other operators to make sure that they comply with the rules. However Brainteaser was a popular competition, creating a lot of genuine winners and many compers will be sad that it’s now ended in such disappointing circumstances.
