More Contests and Sweepstakes

Another folder of competitions and sweepstakes has turned up, offering a few more choice examples of the genre. There’s a wonderful variety of prizes on offer from the obvious (new car, exotic vacations) to the absurdly lavish (twin light aircraft) with the occasionally inspired (a race horse of your own). Watching your very own race horse parade in the paddock with its pint-size passenger on board or take the lead in a crowded field may be the thrill of a lifetime for some. Horses are splendid creatures but they’re not easily house-trained and would make cumbersome family pets. My greatest admiration is reserved for those who are bred for toil - pulling ploughs through recalcitrant earth or dragging logs out of the forest. So I would have passed on this opportunity.

Cash dominates the offers with some ingenious delivery methods (stuffed into a mattress) or instalment options based on monthly or annual increments extended for a lifetime. Oxydol’s offer of a brand new 6 room home (every week for 5 weeks) is intriguing and it would be fascinating to know what became of the fortunate five.  The “His and Hers” planes (plus 20 hours of flight instruction) and the two Ford Mustangs for the runners up are helpfully colour coded blue and red to avoid any arguments. Poetry is in short supply with the honourable exception of Johnson & Johnson who are tempting your offspring with a chance to “Win Your Wildest Dream”.

 

Fridge Full of Cold Cash

There are consumers out there for whom the world of contests, competitions and giveaways is their playground. With hard work and persistence, and a little good fortune they can enrich their lives by turning a box top or postage stamp into a year’s supply of dog food or a trolley-dash through Pets at Home. At the top of the profession, an exclusive minority can be found flying first class, scoffing in Michelin starred restaurants and irradiating themselves on tropical beaches in gated resorts, all at no cost to themselves. Online tools are easily available to search for opportunities and all that’s required is an unshakeable faith in the disinterested generosity of big business and a bulk supply of postage stamps.

These examples are drawn from my mid-century data dump - they have a certain rough charm with their basic, shouty graphics, designed to lift the ads off the page and capture the attention of the ever-hopeful consumer on the lookout for free stuff. New cars are the most frequent offer but a refrigerator stuffed with dollar bills is an arresting prospect that could tempt even the most sober reader. No proof of purchase required and only four statements to be deemed true or false - just spare a thought for the unhappy citizens of Nebraska and New Jersey whose state laws prohibit their participation in this bonanza. Inflation note: the contents of the fridge in 1959 would have to be uprated to $220,000 to maintain the buying power. In cryptocurrency this equates to 23 bitcoins (as at May 2020). How to store bitcoins in a fridge is another problem. Not everything is a sweepstake - sometimes there’s a test of skill where some linguistic agility could come in handy. Completing a sentence on the merits of Ivory Flakes must win the judge’s approval with wordplay or internal rhyming. Another popular task is to bestow a name upon the progeny of a brand character (Borden’s) or find a name for a little sleepyhead (Englander beds).

The most ingenious offer comes courtesy of Remington Shavers - the chance to become your own personal fund manager and launch yourself on Wall Street where unlimited wealth could be yours for the taking. The lucky winner could choose their own share stocks to the value of the sum of a single share in every quoted company on the New York Stock Exchange as at May 31st. 1957. 1957 turned out to be a bear market with a marked decline in stock values. But anyone who chose to invest $1,000 in the newly launched Disney shares would be 3 million dollars better off by 2019.

Bicycles, Watches & Books

As long ago as 1897 the British consumer was subject to all manner of ingenious inducements to favour one branded product over another. Nobody took the philosophy of competition more seriously than the hyperactive Lord Leverhulme in his mission to cleanse the Victorian working class exclusively with bars of Sunlight and Lifebuoy soap. Sunlight was a laundry soap, launched in 1884 while Lifebuoy was for personal use and had only been on the market for 2 years. Lux soap was still 2 years in the future. Plenty of long-standing competitors (Pears’, Wright’s Coal Tar, Hudson’s, Vinolia*) were prolific advertisers and Leverhulme’s response was to extend the reach of his advertising from general to specialist periodicals and launch lavishly funded promotional rewards designed to tie customers to his brands. To claim a prize a customer had to submit a minimum of 50 Sunlight or Lifebuoy wrappers. Combinations of the two weren’t acceptable. This was a major challenge for the average user and almost insurmountable for those who aspired to win a bicycle since the value of the prize was proportionate to the number of wrappers sent in. It’s safe to say that the additional sales revenue must have comfortably exceeded the value of prizes won by the fortunate few. History doesn’t record whether interested parties formed themselves into syndicates to pool their resources - even if successful they would have faced the problem of how to divide the ownership of a bicycle or a pocket watch. Advertisers are never less than one step ahead of consumer resistance and one failsafe technique is to present the manufacturer as a paragon of disinterested generosity, showering its loyal customers with munificence. In the last decade of the Victorian era, consumer business expanded at speed and famous brands intensified the battle for supremacy. A very different story from the languid Fin de Siècle decadence that prevailed in the expressive arts.

*Hudson’s Soap was acquired by Leverhulme in 1908, Vinolia in 1906 and Pears’ in 1920. When Simple Skincare was bought by Unilever in 2010, it became the owner of Wright’s Traditional Soap, as it is now known.