Looking back: 2018

Last year was great in so many ways. Beating my personal best was obviously awesome, as was winning a tote bag advertising an oversized aubergine emoji, but more important was my growth as a comper. For example, I pulled off my first proper tie-break win; I made my first proper forays into purchase-necessary comping; and I made first contact with real-life compers!

Real-life compers?! The very idea! When I first started comping in 2014, I ploughed a lonely furrow. Ploughed it like a headless chicken, perhaps, but absolutely on my tod, if only because I was shy of barging in on other people’s conversations or tagging strangers on social media comps.

Fortunately, compers tend to be a lovely bunch, and my wall-flowering wasn’t tolerated for long. Even so, after years of online banter, I still found it hard to accept that behind the avatars, these people were bona-fide meat-based life-forms. Similarly, the likelihood of ever being unable to hide behind my online persona was sufficiently remote as to be academic.

Then, of course, came my Wimbledon win, and with it (to use the official collective noun), a great big hospitality suite of actual, physical, compers. This blew my mind.

I’ve never found social situations particularly easy, and the risk that I might have to respond to someone in real-time with no opportunity to hole up and craft my response with monk-like focus, made me extremely nervous. Fortunately, my wife was there to rescue me from social awkwardness and over-enthusiasm with the complimentary refreshments, while a brilliant comper I’ve admired for some time took me under her wing, and assured me that over-enthusiasm with the complimentary refreshments was actually my moral duty, and, moreover, next time I should bring Tupperware and pack a little something for the journey home.

A shared win, of course, is a wonderful day out, and it’s impossible not to have a good time. But what about a meet-up in everyday life - and one without free champagne at that?!

Still good, as it happens. A pilot group of four Norwich compers convened towards the end of last year, and to the best of my knowledge, we all survived. Certainly, I did anyway. Better still, plans are afoot for a larger meeting, though whether it’ll be large enough for me to do a little wall-flowering for old times' sake remains to be seen.

So, I’ve grown socially, but what about those purchase-necessary comps? For a number of reasons, I’ve historically steered clear of these, not least because I get most of my groceries delivered and I can’t trust Tony Tesco to pick the right products. I’m also not going to stuff my face with deep-fried calorie-dense junk on the off-chance of winning a keyring.

By the middle of 2018, however, I realised that I was comping myself into a corner. It’s easily done, of course. When your only opportunity to comp is the two minutes before school while the children are wrestling with their shoelaces and/or each other, you reach for the easiest option - in my case, Instagram.

And for a while, it was working. By the middle of the year, I had averaged one Insta win a week - better than the rest of my endeavours combined. But nothing lasts forever. As Instagram became a more fertile source of giveaways, so my fortune declined. Maybe that was due to the rise of the infinite-entry comp, or maybe more comps are being run across platforms. More likely, it’s that seagulls follow the trawler because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.

The fact is, nobody can know for sure, but it’s more useful to do something about it than dwell on it. For this reason, I once more stepped out of my comfort zone, and had a good sniff of the purchase-necessary comps.

What I found here is that not all purchase comps are created equal. For a start, there’s a major difference between a comp that wants a unique code and one that wants a batch code and one that wants a barcode. Last year, my Anchor Butter barcode scored a lunch-bag on the second attempt, while my Dairylea Dunkers’ barcode got more play than Daniel Sturridge - and definitely won more. Likewise, the batch code on the Pepsi Max bottle I found while attending a mindfulness course back in July has probably had a greater impact on my long-term mental health than the course itself.

As for the unique codes … well, there’s the rub. It’s one thing to buy an alternative brand of loo roll when the competition packs are on special, but it’s quite another to sink a jerrycan of Powerthirst in the hope of scoring anything beyond Type 2 diabetes. But each to his own line in the sand. Personally, I’d love to win an Xbox from Lucozade, but since I can't bring myself to cough up more than fourpence a bottle, the eggs in my basket are strictly wombled.

As you will no doubt have surmised then, when it comes to unique code comps, my career track record is brief: two plushies. These were given away by Plenty in a promotion that its marketing agency promised would “really inject some fun and excitement into the Household Towel category, not only by adding value with every pack, but also through recruiting younger families into the category and ultimately driving incremental volume”.

So, I might not have won big, but when it comes to fun and excitement in the Household Towel category, you really can’t put a price on those memories.

How did you get out of your comfort zone last year? Does your local comping group ever meet up and if so, what do you get up to? Do you enter purchase-necessary comps? Let me know in the comments below!