Earlier this week, Seabrook Crisps announced a brand new competition. It offered daily prizes and a massive £10,000 top prize. However, the £10K was going to go to the person who could refer the most people to the Goodbye Salt Hello Flavour site. This brought sounds of frustration from across the comping community as many felt it would be open to abuse. People could possibly also “cheat” their way to the top by buying referrals. Also, a site like Loquax, a comping blog, freebie site, or offers portal could easily use a referral code onsite and potentially produce a lot of referrals. As far as we could see there was nothing in the rules preventing us from doing so. As is, we didn’t include a referral link on our site listing. Anyway, most referral win competitions tend to put the top prize out of reach of a lot of entrants – and they’re really not that much fun.
Changes To The Competition
Thankfully, Seabrook Crisps have listened to the arguments surrounding the competition and today have announced some changes. Here are the changes that they’ve implemented. “Everyone who registers/has registered is entered into each daily draw to win £200 of Love2shop retail vouchers. There’s a weekly draw for a year’s supply of Seabrook Crisps and a Seabrook factory tour, which everyone who registers/has registered is entered into. To enter the draw for the £10k Salt Pot jackpot, just register & get 1 valid referral. Each valid referral thereafter gets you 1 additional entry into the £10k draw (To a maximum of 100 entries per person). All existing valid referrals and registrations stand”.
A Good Move?
In some ways this is a good move. It means everyone who refers at least one person has the chance of winning. However, the maximum referral element could still see potential abuse and Seabrook Crisps will need to be on their game to make sure there’s not a glut of people cheating this aspect of the competition. After all, buying 100 referrals is a lot cheaper than buying enough to take the top prize outright. We’d have preferred to have seen a split in the prize money. Perhaps a £5000 prize draw for everyone who managed one valid referral (one entry per person), £4000 in prizes split amongst people who have gone above and beyond promoting the competition and then £1000 split amongst the top referrers.
No Perfect Solution
There’s no perfect solution, of course, but by redistributing the prize money you take away the emphasis on the referral element, which to be brutally honest is nothing but a “spam your friends feature”. We’ve never been a fan of these kind of competitions. They’re good in some ways for the brand, but in others they can reflect badly (e.g. people posting their referral links on forums when they shouldn’t). Anyway, if you want to enter then head on over to Seabrook Crisps. Note that this link does contain a referral code – we’d like at least one entry into the £10,000 draw after all! Note, that this is the only link where we’ll feature it. If you want to enter, but don’t want to be referred via Loquax then use this link instead! The competition runs until the 17th July 2011.