1017: Estimated prize value (£). What a difference a year makes: 2018 was my most successful year by some margin; 2019, the least. There are reasons for this, of course - building works, for example, are always highly disruptive - but the main issue was a lack of focus. The year didn’t start well and I ended up taking my foot off the pedal. In fact, the only reason my score tipped over a grand was due to an administrative error in my favour. That’s not to say I had a bad year - how can something be bad when you’re enjoying yourself?!
300: Highest-value prize (£). Prize of the year has to be my PS4. A quick look online suggests that I’ve over-valued it here, but prices have a tendency to yo-yo, and I’m pretty sure Amazon was listing the bundle at £300 when I got the winning notification. RRP is just a number - what counts is the quality time I plan to have with this little sucker!
70: Value of vouchers won (£). Amazon (£50); bar tab (£20). Just as that Amazon voucher eased the pain of Christmas shopping, that bar tab is going to ease the pain of Christmas school holidays…
39: Number of wins. Not even a win a week - must do better!
18: Number of Instagram wins. While Insta is still my most fertile source of wins, the luck is drying up. The problem isn’t fewer comps - if anything, that number is on the rise. The real problem is the number of entries. Note: that’s not necessarily the same as the number of entrants, although I suspect this number is on the rise too; rather, it’s the number of comps permitting unlimited entries. Sure, I might chuck in a token tag for a bottle of scotch, but some people are tagging twenty friends for a share-bag of lentils, and that makes no sense at all. 15: Cash won (£). 15. Blew it all on my Mastercard bill.
4: T-shirts. I’ve outgrown the best one too. Lay off the pies, Neill!
3.3: Prizes still to arrive. To be fair, one of these prizes was a Christmas Day win (a Shreddies stormtrooper cereal bowl - woo!), so it’s unrealistic to expect that to have arrived already. By contrast, my box of Walker’s Crisps and Cadbury’s beanie are, for shame, overdue, but the fulfilment logistics for huge giveaways seldom run smoothly, so I’ll worry about those when I get round to it. As for that errant one-third of a prize, well, I guess we’ll see what we’ll see…
1: Comping son. It took a whole bunch of nagging to get him to knuckle down, but no one unboxes like my second-born!
How did your year go? Let me know in the comments below!
After the bedlam of the advent season, I enjoy the relative calm of January, when the promotional calendar doesn’t so much expire as get a bit of a stitch, and anyone who wants to beg off for a month doesn’t really have to worry about missing out, because the big prizes are done for the next few weeks, right?
Well, that would normally be the case, but this year was different. This was the year that a non-conventional promoter disrupted things by promising to make one hundred retweeters into yen millionaires. OK, so a million yen is a fraction as exciting as a million dollars (less than one-hundredth, if we’re splitting hairs), but it’s a sweet prize pool by any measure. Shame the odds didn’t work out so well - the original tweet hit 4.5 million retweets, making it the most retweeted tweet ever.
Still, with odds like that, no one really expects to win, so no one’s really disappointed. It’s not like being told you’ve won a VIP trip for two to attend the Champions League Final, only to find the promoter has inadvertently told every man and his dog that they’re winners too. As Zavvi will testify, mistakes happen.
In their defence, Zavvi did at least want someone to win their comp. Contrast this with Numatic, who ran a comp soliciting selfies from anyone attending Glastonbury with their Henry vacuum cleaner. Number of entries meeting the entry criteria: nil. That I won some colouring books for my ostentatiously Photoshopped effort was a complete bonus as I’d have been hard-pushed to find a legitimate use for a two-metre FloMax hose, crevice tool and tapered adaptor.
When bad photoshopping wins also-ran prizes
Of course, where there’s yin there’s yang. While one company is rolling out comps with nigh-impossible entry criteria, another is making ones so easy a baby could win. At least, that’s what one Edmonton couple found when they left their toddler unattended with the TV remote and ended up with an expenses-paid holiday to Tokyo. Fat chance me enjoying similar luck - last time I left children in the same room as my consumer durables, their primal grunting landed me with an Amazon Prime account.
Finally then, let me leave you with 10,000 reminders about the importance of reading the terms and conditions. Most people wouldn’t expect to find a competition embedded in the small print of their travel insurance, but that’s exactly what one woman found, back in March, and she ended up $10,000 richer. Will this encourage me to study my documents more carefully next time I buy insurance? Absolutely. Will I read the Apple media terms and conditions next time I update iTunes? Are you insane?!
If I’ve missed any of this year’s big stories, do let me know in the comments below! Hope you had a lucky one!
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!
6541: Estimated prize value (£). In a world where RRP bears little relation to market value, and some prizes are in any case not available to buy, this figure is naturally informed by a bucketload of guesswork. My day out at the ladies’ Wimbledon final is a case in point. Anyone looking for a vaguely similar experience would be spending £3000 on debenture tickets. Even without access to the hospitality zone, the cost of lunch and afternoon tea for two, along with centre court tickets and a keg of Pimms would have pushed me so far into the red that I’d have been living off glacé cherries and expired medicine for the foreseeable future. Obviously, there's more than one way to skin the proverbial accountant; in the present case, however, the flaying technique is academic: 2018 has been my most successful year by some margin.
1400: Volume of liquor won (ML). With a bottle of Italian gin and a bottle of Irish whiskey in the bag, this has been my best year for the hard stuff. Complementing this, there were also a dozen bottles of beer and a dozen bottles of cider to ease the trauma of parenting. Maybe next year I’ll win some Alka-Seltzer too.
390: Highest-value prize that was nothing to do with tennis (£). These watches were designed by a madman. Some days they make my brain hurt so much that I have to wear something different instead. But aren’t they just the cutest?
378: Value of vouchers won (£). Unlike cash wins, vouchers are great because the cretins at E.On can’t nick them after lousing up your gas bill, again. Most excitingly this year, I’ve had £150 in John Lewis vouchers and £100 to blow on the absurdly beautiful shirts made by JL Berlue. I’ve also had vouchers for Decathlon (£90), Screwfix (£25), the Google Play Store (£15), Starbucks (£10), Toymaster (£10) and Amazon (£3) - the latter coming from the brilliant Ribena promotion where the prizes may have been small, but boy were they persistent.
200: Cash won (£). A £200 injection into the bank account is always great, even if it does end up in some faceless utility company’s slush fund.
90: Number of wins. Despite a couple of dry patches and (all things considered) a relatively quiet December, I’m not far off two wins a week. I’m well chuffed with that!
55: Number of Instagram wins. More than half of my wins came from Instagram this year, but what started as a purple patch regressed into a blue period not long after the summer. Based on nothing more than anecdotal evidence, I suspect this was due to more promoters running comps over multiple channels, and more comps allowing multiple entries, but I couldn't possibly say for sure. Sometimes the ball just bounces the wrong way.
7: Value of spoiled wins after my serum sample smashed on the bathroom sink after my first-born hit the bathroom cabinet like a bull in a bran tub (£). Hilarity did not ensue.
4.69: Value of wombled winnings (£). After finding a suite of McDonald’s Monopoly stickers par terre, I indulged my first-born with a Big Mac Meal, which he tackled like the aforementioned bull in a bathroom cabinet. Temporary adoration ensued.
4: Cost to redeem Lucozade win (pence). Again, still?! That’s two years in a row that I’ve had to pay to receive my “free” bottle of Lucozade prize!
1: Comping mother. Now that my mum has moved down the road I’m doing my utmost to induct her into the comping community (read: nagging and nagging and nagging till she enters certain comps). In the last four weeks, she’s won a Bonne Maman hamper, £30 John Lewis vouchers and posh handcreams and house fragrance stuff from Lavender & Lillie. Considering that she’s only entered about ten comps, that's quite some win rate…
So much for the numbers, but what about the graphs? Well, to be honest, I failed to record a bunch of useful information this year, so my pie charts would be neither use nor ornament. I can, however, offer a long-tail graph to illustrate the distribution of prize value...
As one would expect, most of the prizes were worth under £50. Twenty-one (23%), however, were worth at least £50. Again, I'm really happy with that!
What do the stats say about your year? Let me know in the comments below!
When seasonal devastation abounds, the view through one’s fingers generally provides the ideal vantage point to look back upon the year. As it’s probably too soon to comment on how 2018 has treated me (after all, with a week to go, anything could happen), I find myself instead reflecting on some of my fondest memories from the last 12 months in the world of comping.
Personally, I'm always drawn to those stories with the kind of ridiculously mild drama that only a true comper will really appreciate - in other words, compers' problems.
The classic comper’s problem, of course, is winning more than you bargained for. Traditionally, this entails the logistical challenge of fitting, say, a year’s worth of cheese into a fridge the size of a biscuit. Less commonly, it involves winning a fridge large enough to hold not only said cheese, but also take the biscuit and one modestly sized person to chow in situ.
Less obviously droll, however, was Cadbury’s White Creme Egg promotion - a scavenger hunt plagiarised from the world of Willy Wonka, but with additional ick in the golden ticket, if the confectionery suffered anything like as much unauthorised unwrapping as I suspect.
Cadbury hasn't confirmed the volume of product spoilage, but I'm guessing it was outweighed by the value of the column inches the promotion acquired, given that round 2 is being promoted already, although (small print alert) the eggs aren’t being released till January.
When it comes to gaming the system with purchase-necessary competitions, there is of course a line in the sand. For the absence of doubt, contaminating food with cooties is over that line. Likewise, while wombling Lucozade bottles is perfectly acceptable, stealing McDonald’s Monopoly stickers at knifepoint is absolutely not.
I can understand someone's reluctance to munch through that much junk food, but it’s important to know when a promotion simply isn't for you. Case in point: US$300 prize money would never get me sitting in a coffin for 30 hours, but each to their own. As Tina Seelig might say, how you make your luck is a matter of individual choice (and to state the obvious, knife crime is a BAD choice).
For the purpose of clarity, it's always worth distinguishing between fortune, chance and luck. To return to Tina Seelig (with thanks to Di Coke for sharing this article!):
Fortune is things that are outside of your control, things that happen to you. I’m fortunate to be raised by a loving family. I’m fortunate to be born in this place and time. I’m fortunate to have blue eyes. Chance is something you have to do; I have to take a chance. It requires action on your part in the moment. Buy a lottery ticket. Ask someone on a date. Apply to a job. Luck is something where you have even more agency. You make your own luck by identifying and developing opportunities in advance.
A few years back, I chose to be more lucky - and so I am. I didn't get here by magic - anyone who makes the right decisions can make themselves equally lucky - if not more so.
To this end, I hope your 2019 is full of great opportunities and really good decisions!
The FIFA World Cup used to be the cornerstone of my life. I got together with my other half during the 1998 tournament, and exactly four years later, we were married. Another four years on and we were still gorging on as many matches as we could fit around full-time work. Come 2010, however, our first-born was three months old and did not care for international football - not one little bit.
I was on the afternoon shift at that point, but every time I sat down, he’d wail. Watching Germany dissect England is excruciating at best, but there’s nothing like doing it while you slow dance with a mardy bairn to really put the boot in. It was at this point that I stopped watching football.
That’s not to say I stopped taking an interest, however, as I’d just learned about matched betting - the clever-dick form of gambling where you don’t end up out of pocket as the bookies kindly pony up the stakes for you. Now’s not the time for the full ins and outs of the hustle as they’re way too complicated to explain in a glib aside (though if you are interested, see Nikki Hunter-Pike's post), suffice to say that it was a boom-time for bookmakers running promotions to expand their social media reach.
888Sport, in particular, was on a mission to own the market, and was giving away free bets and branded merchandise left, right and centre - in the space of a year, its various score prediction and caption competitions had provided me with a branded polo shirt, rugby ball, laptop sleeve, three hoodies, two packs of cards and a set of poker chips, not to mention countless free bets and a £60 sportswear voucher.
Then came the big one - the World Cup score-prediction comp. At this point, they really lost their marbles, because in addition to prizes for the overall competition winners, they also encouraged entrants to set up their own mini leagues, and gave these players prizes too. How they worked out a scoring system for the mini leagues I’ve no idea. Truthfully, I wasn’t paying attention. All I knew was that I hadn’t made the top three in the main league, so I didn’t give it another minute’s thought. So, you can imagine my surprise when, a few weeks later, a £120 voucher to spend on sportswear turned up out of the blue.
Sadly, it wasn’t long after this that the penny dropped at 888 HQ and I was barred for being - quite literally - a liability, as 888’s computers twigged that I was taking more money out of the company than I was putting in, so banned me from making any further wagers.
Disappointing as it was to call time on our relationship, lessons were learned and we both moved on: I stopped messing around and committed myself to comping properly, while 888 approached the next World Cup in a far more austere manner, with any suggestion of a re-run knocked squarely on the head.
Nonetheless, it is a truth universally acknowledged that where there’s a World Cup, there’s a prediction competition, and Brazil 2014 was no different. Filling the void left by 888 was a competition of even greater magnitude and generosity, which the Brazil Tourism Board had opened up to pretty much anyone, anywhere. This giveaway had over a hundred prizes, from vouchers to cameras to various Apple products. I didn’t make the top twenty, but still copped an iPod Nano, which was awesome - well, apart from the £30 of import duty I had to pay to receive it.
As this was my first year of comping during a World Cup tournament, I was only just starting to become aware of the sheer volume of competitions that spring up around it - not just the big-ticket giveaways from the official partners and sponsors, but also the numerous unofficial comps from companies that want to join in the excitement, but lack the deep pockets of companies like MasterCard or McDonald’s. For example, thanks to Carpetright, I walked away with an official England shirt; concurrent with this, I also won a tee-shirt of Archie Gemmill scoring against Holland in 1978 - which rounds out my heritage neatly.
The England shirt has served me well - not because I enjoy sartorial statements of nationalism, but rather because it’s super light-weight and doesn’t cling to my sweaty body when I play badminton. It’s also handy for entering football-related competitions, and to this end finally paid dividends this year when I won a giftcard and football from Screwfix for posting a picture of my best football cheer to Instagram. Considering that Screwfix was an official sponsor of the ITV coverage this year, surprisingly few people were entering its comps. Its daily Facebook giveaways were (as I discovered too late) getting fewer than 200 entrants, while this Instagram comp had barely a dozen. So, a lesson learned for next time is to check out all the TV partners too!
This year, I also won prizes from two completely unaffiliated companies - three £30 Decathlon vouchers and my choice of football shirt from the FIFA store. The football shirt came from a simple tag-and-follow comp on Instagram - again with barely a dozen entries. Unfortunately FIFA had sold out of my first, second and third choice of kit, so if you were wondering why there’s a picture of me on Instagram wearing the Japanese away strip, now you know.
The first Decathlon voucher, meanwhile, came from a prediction comp I’d found via Google before the tournament began. What I hadn’t clocked, however, was that the score prediction aspect was purely for fun, and that the question you had to bat away before entering said predictions was actually the tie-breaker for that round. You can therefore imagine my surprise when the promoter mailed to let me know that my throwaway comment - “5.30” - was one of the most creative responses to the question, “At what point of the working day are you most on top of your game?”
Any criticism you may wish to throw at the weakness of that response is well deserved - I dread to imagine the quality of the rest of the field that week. Still, if ever there was an example of “got to be in it to win it”, this was it. And, since we’re looking for takeaways, it was also a reminder of the importance of reading instructions!
In any case, you can be sure that I upped my game for the last few rounds. And yes, my renewed efforts did pay off, as I made it into the top three for the final two rounds, giving me a grand total of £90 to spend at Decathlon.
The other great thing about this year’s World Cup was England’s progress. Notwithstanding their overreliance on set-pieces and their charmed avoidance of top-notch opposition, the fact that the team advanced as far as it did was a boon for flash comps. To be sure, I drew a complete blank here, but again, some of these comps had ridiculously few entrants, so I’ll definitely be getting my Tweetdeck house in order for 2022.
At this point, it bears repeating that 2022 will be FIFA's first Winter World Cup, and in case I need to spell it out - that means it’s going to clash with the advents. With this in mind, I’m going to get my first prediction in early: it’ll be carnage!
How did your World Cup season go? Or did you focus on Wimbledon or some other event? Let me know in the comments section!
2650: Total prize value (£). Amazingly, that’s the exact same number as last year. Well, semi-amazingly anyway - there’s a fair amount of rounding goes into these calculations as it’s impossible to attach an exact cost to things when most products can be bought at any number of prices from any number of vendors, with the result that RRP is largely meaningless. To further complicate matters, I’ve got some prizes in America that I’m yet to see, so can’t really say what they’re worth. With this in mind, let’s just say that I did no worse than last year, which is pretty good considering my patchy efforts.
1600: Biggest prize value (£). Oh my, this was nice - four mountain bikes and a GoPro camera from WD40! When I read the winning notification I actually felt a bit queasy, and if I’m honest, I’m still a bit numb - one bike would have been a great prize, as would the camera on its own. The fact that it was from an effort comp made it even sweeter! I’m highly indebted to my second-born for this win, as he undoubtedly added a little x-factor to my entry (see below).
130: Total value of vouchers won (£). This broke down into a £100 Amazon voucher, a £20 high street voucher and a £10 PayPal voucher. The Amazon voucher arrived just in time for my Christmas shopping so was especially appreciated. 44: Number of wins. Actually, my name was pulled out of the hat a total of 47 times, but two of those occasions were for a football match I was unable to attend due to a change in itinerary (the same match!), and I’m reluctant to count the “free” bottle of Lucozade I won during the Made to Move promo as the voucher actually cost me 4p to redeem. On the plus side, my mum gave me the football she won from Walkers, so I’m adding that to the tally!
14: Wins on Instagram. Instagram was my luckiest social channel - but only by a whisker. What’s more, half of my Instagram wins came from the advents, so it wasn’t a consistent source of good fortune. What is interesting, however, is that in contrast to my Facebook success, most of my Instagram wins came from simple comment/tag/regram prize draws. This highlights how much shorter the odds for no-effort comps can be, compared with, say, Facebook or Twitter. Indeed, three of those wins came from comps with under five entrants, while another one had less than ten. On Facebook, meanwhile, all of my wins required some degree of effort.
3: Total piggyback wins. I love piggyback wins! I’m talking, of course, about competitions where prizes are awarded to winning entrants AND their friends - a form of giveaway that I’ve observed most often on Instagram, though I’m sure exists elsewhere. In 2017, I got a free-ride on tea bags, a Corcicle canteen and about £50 of Bach flower remedies, thanks to my brilliant comping buddies - fingers crossed, they’ll get some payback in 2018!
I hope you also got a chance to look at your prize spreadsheet in more detail during the festive season - let me know if you spotted any unanticipated patterns!
It’s that time of year again: the point when you’ll surely split your seams if you so much as think about tackling another competition - or am I thinking of mince pies?! In either case, it’s time for a cup of tea and nice sit down, while we reflect on what has happened in the wider world of comping this year. My sole prediction for 2017 was that we’d probably be saying hello to Roady McRoadface. As ever, the inevitable came to pass. Specifically, a 10-block section of the I-80 in Salt Lake City was officially adopted by one Roady McRoadface in June this year.
Closer to home - by which I mean slightly closer to the world of comping - the highest-profile competition of the year was surely the raffle to win a truly unique, money-can’t-buy experience: a Valentine’s date with Idris Elba. (I confess, I did think of entering, but didn’t want my wife to get jealous!) Bonus points were definitely scored for the video released alongside the campaign, where a room full of children advised Mr Elba how best to handle himself on said date.
Speaking of competitions I didn’t enter, it would be remiss of me not to mention one of the most eye-catching prizes of the year: an 8-foot bust of Jeremy Clarkson. Kudos to the winner for finding one of the lowest-entry comps of the year!
I’ll be honest, I also didn’t enter the South Park ‘I am the Fart’ competition, which required entrants to submit a video of them breaking wind. Much as I fancied being flown to San Francisco to have my Bronx cheer made into 'the official in-game fart' for the latest South Park video game, I'm sad to say that the voting element of the comp hit a real bum note…
Finally, that leaves the lamentable tale of the prankster who, on at least two occasions, convinced members of the public to lick the feet of complete strangers in the hope of winning an imaginary £3000 prize. In the first case, this was in addition to letting Poundworld staff draw on their faces and ride them like ponies. That the Iceland staff merely had to hide under tables and pretend to be vacuum cleaners seems pretty mild by comparison.
There's probably a lesson to be learned from that last story, but I think my tea needs topping up. Oh, and did someone mention mince pies?
What were your favourite comping stories from 2017? Let me know in the comments below!
Now that it’s all over but the unboxing, it’s time for a quick glance back at the last 12 months.
For me, it’s been a year of two halves. By April, I’d won a GoPro camera, four bikes and VIP tickets to watch Norwich City play - prizes with a grand ticket price in the region of £1900. At that point, In needed only to maintain a win rate of £70 per month for the rest of the year and I’d have beaten my personal best.
Sadly, my form took a dip, and my blue period gave my mojo a good roasting. Although I’ve since recovered, that hasn’t translated to the same kind of luck as last year, when I averaged a win every other day in December. That’s not to be a moaning minnie - I still managed about two a week (although three of those were in America, so it’ll be a while before I see those wins - if at all!).
More than anything else, though, my 2017 is going to go down as the year of the sublime and the ridiculous. It’s the year I won cologne from both Paul Smith and Peperami; a £100 voucher to spend at Amazon and a coupon for a bottle of Lucozade that ended up costing four pence to redeem; an awesome flannel shirt for my lad and, for me, a hoodie from a peddler of online smut.
Be honest - which would you rather have?
Still, it’s the utter randomness of the draw that keeps the game interesting. Sure, you can shorten your odds, and develop that luck muscle, but unless you can find a competition with no other entrants, the result, like so much in life, could go in any direction. And if you’re lucky enough to find a competition with no other entrants, there’s a good chance it’ll be pretty niche - at least, that’s how I ended up with a beanie hat advertising cattle disinfectant.
The other notable development this year has been my minor success as a piggy-back winner.
I don’t know if there’s an official term for this mode of winning, but I’m talking about giveaways where the entry mechanic requires compers to tag a friend or two, and prizes are awarded not just to the winning entrant but also their friends. This mechanic is great for a whole bunch of reasons. Most obviously, it adds a random-act-of-kindness to the prize-giving - I love that for some folks, the prize will come completely out of the blue. Simply put, it’s a fantastic way for promoters to foster brand sentiment (and in my case, provide a little mojo boost).
In fact, I’ve had three such mojo boosts this year, having won teabags, a Corcicle canteen and a bunch of flower remedies thanks to my lovely comping buddies, Lorna and Rebecca. (This is the point where I call for a virtual team hug, topped off with seasonal high-fives, and, what the hell, finger pistols too!)
But I’d hate for the rest of y’all to feel left out - drop us a comment below to let everyone know how your year has gone, and I'll chuck you an attaboy as you collect your mince pie!
Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge I'm trying not to lose my head It's like a jungle sometimes It makes me wonder how I keep from goin' under (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, 1982)
I’m not usually one for prefacing my posts with hip hop lyrics, but in this instance I really couldn’t not.
For starters, you may have noticed the absence of posts these last few weeks. That’s because I haven’t been well. I’m not talking about the stomach bug that my youngest brought home from school (although, to be fair, it wasn’t a net contributor to my mojo), but rather the clashing episodes of exhaustion, stress and depression. I also developed a corn.
I hope you’ll forgive the lack of further detail here. I’m perfectly happy to discuss my mental health (or my corn) with anyone with a vaguely passing interest, but as this blog is supposed to be a permanent record of the positive things in my life, I’d prefer to take that offline. For the sake of this post, however, it's quite sufficient to know that November was rotten.
Generally speaking, I find prize-winning to be a great way to kick-start the endorphins. Of course, the fly in that ointment was that my comping flatlined in October, meaning that the number of treats heading my way could be counted on the fingers of one tennis ball.
On the plus side, however, there was always my corn to contend with.
Two years of wearing the same footwear around the house, day in, day out, had taken its toll. My left foot cried ‘Hold, Enough!’, giving me no option but to re-shoe it.
Normally, that would mean one more chore to add to the list. Happily though, I had in anticipation of such drama stashed away a pair of suede Pumas that I won back in 2015. The promoter? One Grandmaster Flash.
I’ve no idea how I stumbled upon this competition, but it was great and bad in equal measure: great because there weren’t many entrants, but bad because the entry mechanic was highly flawed.
To enter, you had to guess Flash’s five favourite hip hop records. The answers weren’t hard to find - everything you needed to know was in his recent Twitter feed; the problem was that most of the songs weren’t hip hop!
I figured that this wasn’t the time to split hairs, so I fed the promoter the songs listed on Twitter and crossed my fingers. Happily it was the right call.
The story didn’t end there, however. I knew the prize comprised a Puma track-top and trainers; I also knew that (for reasons not shared with me) it was going to take considerably longer than the average four weeks for the prize to arrive. Eventually, all became clear: the prize was not being handled by the Puma marketing team, but rather by Flash’s wardrobe crew! The jacket and shoes arrived in the UK with the rest of his tour gear. I'd won an official (and I’m pretty sure money-can’t-buy) Grandmaster Flash track-top!
Flash's back
To add to the craziness, they didn’t courier the prize to me. Rather, they hired a despatch driver to bring it from central London up to Norwich! I can’t imagine how much that cost, but I’m pretty sure it was more than the monetary value of the prize.
Two years have passed since then, and while trying not to lose my head has a more regular position on my to-do list, being physically able to enjoy the fruits of this hobby, even when I’m barely working at it, definitely helps me keep from going under.
How long have you waited for the right moment to appreciate a prize? Let me know in the comments below!
One day last week, as I decanted the final box of Maldon sea salt, an exquisite memory prevailed over me, and at once the monotony of the chore became indifferent to me - the travails of the day innocuous, the grind illusory. This new sensation had on me the effect which fortune has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the salt, but whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?
OK, let’s not over-egg the pudding: I recently decanted some salt. It was the final box from a set of three 250g ‘limited edition’ packets I won back in 2015. Although the prize was one of the most modestly valued items I’ve ever won, its arrival sticks in my mind more than most. Partly that’s because it turned up out of the blue, and partly it’s because I remember remarking how the cost of mailing the best part of a kilo of salt was three times what that salt was actually worth.
The salt in question (decanted)
Mostly, however, the prize sticks in mind because salt is such an elemental part of our very existence: our bodies become chemically unbalanced without it, our muscles and nervous system cease to function and, well, I guess we die.
To be honest, I consume less salt than I’d like. That’s not a conscious choice; rather, it’s because, like many parents of small children, we cook without it and then fail to season our food as we’re too absorbed in whatever argument we’re having with the aforementioned beasts. That’s why I seize moments to enjoy it as conspicuously as possible. I’m talking super fresh, crusty bread with unsalted butter, a sprinkle of salt flakes and NO INTERRUPTIONS!
But that’s by the by. The important thing is to notice how and remember that even the smallest of prizes can touch you on an absolutely fundamental level - in my case, the absorption of an essential daily mineral for somewhere in the region of 24 months (and counting).
Or, to look at it another way, two years of literally seasoning my meals with lucky dust.
Small wins are great! Which ones have been your favourite? Did any change your life?!
Back in 2010, the bookies discovered social media. They gave away so many free bets that, for a few months, I had a nice little side hustle in free gambling. By no means did I make a fortune, but I did take sufficient money from one company that they flagged me as The Wrong Kind of Customer and effectively barred me from placing any more bets.
This was especially disappointing as these guys ran loads more competitions than any of the other bookies, with the result that, on top of the free bets, I’d also won branded hoodies, poker chips, playing cards and a polo shirt. Without doubt, I was having a ball (literally - it was a rugby ball).
The merchandise was great, but there was icing on the cake too: I accumulated something like £200 of credit at a store specialising in soccer apparel, both modern and retro. This explains how I ended up with, among other things, an Atlanta Chiefs jersey that is every bit as flammable as its 1981 counterpart and an exquisite replica of Zaire’s 1974 World Cup strip that I’m no longer able to wear since becoming a biscuit shovelling snack beaver (yes, I do blame the children).
The credit came in the form of gift vouchers, so it was a case of use it or lose it. And being the sort of person who wouldn’t buy so much as a cheese straw without first checking in to Quidco, there was no way I was going to fill my basket with big stuff and then let the chump change slip through my fingers.
Goodness knows how long I spent trawling through the bin-ends, most likely with spreadsheet and calculator to hand, but eventually I found a scarf and a couple of keyrings to round out the order. I possibly had to write off as much as seven pence worth of prize money, but somehow I summoned the inner strength to stomach such egregious waste.
Keyrings, of course, are both subtle and useful, and they began to earn their keep almost as soon as my prize parcel arrived. Football scarves, by contrast, are bluntly ostentatious statements of tribal identity, and - when they deviate from the designated colour scheme - arguably iffy in one-horse towns.
That’s not to say that the fine citizens of Norwich would have given me a good pitchforking had I openly allied myself with Paraguay, but I was certainly unsure whether wearing said scarf would actually have been cricket. To this end, it sank to the bottom of the winter accessories box, where it lay, cruelly neglected, for the next few years.
You can, therefore, imagine my excitement when I read - in the Guardian, no less - that football scarves are presently a la mode. My scarf is now out of the box, around my neck, and officially holding my wardrobe together.
With hindsight, you might say that the scarf represents a watershed. Certainly, it was after this prize bundle that I started thinking that winning stuff was a highly agreeable experience, and that maybe I should look into making it a more regular event. If nothing else, I’m going to treat it with more respect from now on: it’s not just an accessory - it’s the symbol of the moment I decided to be more lucky!
What got you into comping? Did you win a prize and decide you wanted more, or did you just wake up one day and decide to be lucky? What prizes contributed most to making you the comper you are today? Do you still have your first prize? Let me know in the comments...
PS: I meant to post this the other week. I’ve a strong suspicion football scarves are OUT again.
The dry spell is over. All wins are great, of course, but some make for better copy than others.
For example, there’s only so much spin you can put on being the only entrant in a Twitter comp to win a branded beanie hat from a company specialising in cattle disinfectant.
I also won some teabags. Well, technically, I was tagged in a comp won by an Instagram tag buddy, but any port in a storm, right?
So, in the absence of exciting stories, I’ll fall back on throwback and tell you about my very first win.
It was the summer term of 1999, which would have made me 14. A chap from Cambridge University Press came into our English class to talk about something - I’m guessing publishing, but the memories are hazy - for all I know, it was the mating habits of the Palawan stink badger.
At the end of this clearly memorable session, we were, as was the norm, set our weekly homework. What made this week different, however, was that (a) it would take five minutes instead of the usual hour or more, and (b) there would be prizes.
I wasn’t the kind of pupil to need reward-based incentivisation; however, I did have an admirable track record when it came to rushing my homework to get my parents off my back so I could get on with my R&R. Thus, when I was tasked with writing a story in a sentence, it was as good as giving me a week off.
Mine wasn’t the best entry. The best entry was (I later learned) plagiarised from Stephen King. The judges clearly suspected something was afoot, however, and awarded first prize - a concise Chambers Dictionary - to my hastily tossed off guff about a radioactive worm. (Stephen King, since you ask, bagged but a pocket dictionary.)
My story in a sentence, aged 14, as recovered from the July 1999 Parents Newsletter.
I still have the dictionary. The dust-jacket is long since perished, of course, and the spine flaps around in the draft, and if you want the skinny on latte or for that matter any other contemporary term such as LOL, vape or emoji, it’s plainly no use at all. That said, if I want slumpflation or perestroika, then it’s totally my go-to reference book.
I’ll be honest though, it’s not the win that got me into this game. Half my class didn’t bother with the homework, so I didn’t feel like I’d won fair and square. What’s more, the plagiarism wasn’t even confessed for another couple of years, so I simply couldn’t understand how I could possibly have beaten Stephen King. It didn’t sit right.
Oh the innocence! I love that it never even occurred to me that someone might cheat. But more than that, it makes me laugh that I didn’t value my win because the odds weren’t long enough. Coming from someone who did a victory dance after scoring a cow soap beanie against zero opposition, that really is incredible.
What was your very first win? Did it give you the bug, or did that come later?
The last few weeks haven’t been kind. I blame the change in routine. No longer can I use my lunch break to search Twitter for short-lived comps with precious few entrants. Instead, I’ve been sitting down in the evening to run my searches and trawling through page after page of irrelevant US posts. The fact that I’m exhausted by this point only compounds matters.
I’m working to fix this, of course. But in the meantime, I’m reminding myself about my luck credentials by dusting the virtual trophy cabinet, which is to say, working on my Winspiration Pinterest board.
Mostly, my prizes come in drips and drabs, so I can only really snap them one at a time. Last December, however, was my most successful month ever - in fact, things went so well that my wins were stacking up on my desk faster than I could find homes for them. At one point I was even thinking: Is this what it feels like to be Di Coke? Because if it is, she must feel BRILLIANT!
And that’s when I remembered prize piles.
When I first started comping, I used to pore slack-jawed over the winners’ stories on Prizefinder, gasping at the heaps of things some people were winning on a monthly basis. And I thought: one day, this will be me. And so it was - I was living the dream!
Dry spells are an inevitable part of comping, but it’s how we cope with them that defines us as compers. So, when I realised that this beautiful moment was unfolding before me, I captured it, intending full well to use it in my next trip to the luck recovery clinic.
Some of my wins from December 2016
When I look back on this picture, I think YES - I really can do this! I may not be able to make an actual pile in any given month (read, most months), but I'm a total advocate for snapping every last win for posterity. The prize spreadsheet is undoubtedly great, but never underestimate the emotional value of those Kodak moments! Celebrating past glories is just one salve for bruised luck muscles - the best recovery programmes always draw on a combination of therapies. How do you massage your luck back into shape again?!
Just before Christmas, I had my biggest win of the year: an Instax camera and £300 Virgin Experience Days voucher. The camera alone would have been a great prize, but the voucher … well, the voucher got me really excited, because I knew from the off what I wanted - what I needed - a spa break.
I’m a relatively recent convert to the spa experience, but my word have I found them life-changing … To be honest, if it meant I could escape the incessant din of my children, I’d be happy just sitting in a tepid bath for two days. At least I’d be able to hear my own thoughts again. But a spa break - a spa break for two, no less - a spa break for two with massage, dinner, bed and breakfast - not to mention all you can eat jacuzzi time, well, what’s not to love?
I recognise, of course, that once back in my own home, the warm glow of relaxation will recede at a frightening rate of knots, but it’s reassuring to know that my body does still have the capacity to unwind.
The competition itself was simple: share your favourite photo memory of 2016, and Virgin Experience Days would pick a winner. Given the awesomeness of the prize, surprisingly few people entered - maybe 200 or so - so I can only guess folks were distracted by the advent comps.
I had no idea what the promoter was looking for, so I just submitted a snap taken when we went for a family walk in the countryside. It was a beautiful - if cold - day, but I think our youngest found it all a bit much.
But that’s all by and by. Virgin Experience Days is running another competition, this time to win a night away in London, packed with activities. All you need to do is tell them the funniest situation you’ve got into with your other half - before 9AM, 13th February.
I’ve been scratching my head for a story but have so far drawn a blank - I hope you have better luck!
It is, by definition, a work in progress, but I've set up a Pinterest account to link up with this blog - so if you're that way inclined, then do please follow @garywasabi.
So far, I've set up three folders: two for picture competitions (one of winning pictures and one of, erm, not winning pictures) and one for my prizes.
I'm not sure that my prize history will be overly inspirational - though I'll happily stand corrected - but I, for one, am a big fan of seeing what works and what doesn't when it comes to creative comps. To this end, I hope this will ultimately prove useful to the comping community.
Some of the pictures I know I've taken will take a bit of scratching around to find, but once this is complete, I'll finally have my comping history compiled and ready for public scrutiny.
I hope it cuts the mustard!
Do you have any further suggestions for comping-related Pinterest boards? If so, please let me know in the comments!
I’m no statistician, but I do love
needless extrapolations, so to wave one last final farewell to 2016, here’s the year
in numbers.
2650: Total prize value (£). That’s a
complete stab in the dark, of course. For example, I won a BFG DVD &
merchandise set plus boxed set of Roald Dahl books that the promoter valued at
nearly £300. It’s an awesome prize, but I'd respectfully suggest that someone has their numbers in a knot if they think it's worth more than a ton. I’ve also won a couple of tickets for a circus
performance at next year’s Norfolk & Norwich Festival, but as these aren’t
yet available for purchase, I can only guess the retail price.
71: Total prizes. My sister lives in the
USA, so if I stumble across any low-entry US giveaways, I invariably always enter them, even though the prizes are unlikely to make it to this side of the Atlantic. Case in point, in 2015, I netted some fish fingers and $100 of fancy chocs which my sister consumed on my behalf. In 2016, my US prizes comprised a
hoodie, a t-shirt and a Rogue One popcorn bucket (complete with tickets to
watch the movie). Again, I’m not sure if I’ll be seeing these, so I’m excluding
them from the rest of my prize analysis.
270: Value of largest prize (£). This was
a £200 Virgin Experiences voucher and £70 camera. The following graph shows the
distribution of prize value, providing a textbook example of the financial significance of the so-called long-tail. In case you can’t see, the lowest value prize was
zero.
37: Minimal effort wins based on nothing but luck
(including draws, Rafflecopters, Follow/RTs, and in one case, a dog eating a
biscuit from a Post-It note with my name on it). This figure could actually be
larger - I had a further seven wins from “comment below” comps where it was unclear whether the comment was judged. The pie chart below illustrates
how often my efforts were rewarded. NB: “Tie-break” is used as a blanket term for
any kind of judged short-form content, such as story, poem or even (wait for
it…) tie-breaker.
35: Percentage of wins from Instagram. As the pie chart
shows, Instagram was my most successful source of wins both modest (seeds!) and
marvellous (tickets to see Beyoncé!). NB: The “web” heading comprises not only
web form entries, but also Rafflecopter/Gleam and any comps requiring entrants
to e-mail their entries. I make no apologies for the lack of academic rigour.
9: T-shirts won. More than anything else, I won t-shirts. Most of these were merchandise-related
(Jack Daniel’s, the X-Men etc) so I wasn’t given a choice about size, which
explains why at least four were too big for me (two are yet to arrive). Still,
they’ve made other people happy, which is always a good thing. And, to be fair,
they all wear black better than me anyway...
2: RT wins. To be honest, I enter
so few RT comps that there was never going to be many wins here. Both of these
wins came from low-entry comps I found on obscure hashtag days. Trust me: in 2017, #EdBallsDay is going to be HUGE.
1: Comping wife. Remember the
Chicago Town dance competition? I didn’t stand a chance, so I recruited my
wife. Her second attempt scooped a runner-up prize of a £50 iTunes
voucher and a load of pizza vouchers. She stopped comping immediately
afterwards, thus retiring with a win rate that I will never top. Even better, she said I could spend the voucher on her behalf. I hope you also got a chance to look at your prize spreadsheet in more detail over the Christmas holidays - do let me know if you spotted any unanticipated patterns!
Colour me happy: whether you measure by number of prizes
or by prize value, 2016 has been my most successful year of comping. I won’t pretend
that the majority of wins were anything other than modest, but any time I'm stuck in a dry
patch (and I did have several this year), prizes like this play a key role in my motivation.
Some, I grant, were little more than cracker-fillers
(the golf tees and the luggage tag spring to mind), and, perhaps inevitably, most
of the little ones weren’t exactly exotic, but given the choice between winning
a pint of milk or a viscose scarf that’s too small to function as anything but
a flimsy handkerchief (yep - that was this year’s booby prize), then give me
the milk every time.
As it happens, I won eight pints of milk. I also won a
bag of coffee, a tube of toothpaste, several packets of granola, and more
cheese than I could possibly hope to fit in my fridge. There was also the
matter of the meat pie, but the less said about that, the better. My memories
of the confectionery hamper were certainly sweeter.
On the subject of food, there was just the one dining
experience this year: a family meal at Frankie & Benny’s. This came from a
low-entry photo competition which required entrants to take a picture of the digger
sponsored by F&B at Diggerland, Castleford - there were three prizes and no more than ten
entrants, so the odds were pretty sweet. This prize came in just a few weeks
after I’d copped one of the runner-up prizes on F&B’s Facebook page, so who
says lightning doesn’t strike twice?!
Treats out are always great, of course, and this year
I’ve won something for the whole family: I’ve been twice to see Norwich City
play (although sadly only once in the Premiership…); meanwhile, my kids loved Cirque
Beserk and my wife loved seeing Beyoncé at Wembley. I’ve also won a family
ticket to the Harry Potter studios, so that’s something to look forward to next
year.
I might not have won cash, but I did win the next best thing: vouchers. I was well chuffed that the Christmas list I posted earlier this month won a £100 gift card from Debenhams. This was on top of the £100 Co-op
voucher I won for reciting a fair-trade shopping list; the £50 Sainsbury
voucher for snapping my first-born in his back-to-school uniform; the £20
Rymans voucher for writing a limerick; and the £75 voucher I won from a local menswear
shop. None of these comps had very many entrants; in fact, the last one had
only one - me!
As for the big ones, my year was quite nicely bookended
by wishlist items: an iPad Mini in January and, last week, a £200 voucher for
Virgin Experiences, which I’m blowing on an overnight spa break for my wife and
me - so I’ll have to take at least one night off the comping next year!
But that's enough chatter from me - I hope you've had a great year too! All that remains for me now is to wish you a really great Christmas and a lucky new year - see you in 2017!
How was 2016 for you? Did you tick anything off your
wish list? What are your hopes for 2017?
December is customarily a time for reflection. Actually,
that’s not strictly true: most of the month is spent headless chickening about
Christmas shopping, Christmas plans and Christmas competitions; but there is,
traditionally, a week at the end of the year where the introspection shifts
from snatched moments (usually on the toilet) of wondering where it all went
wrong, to a more extended period of pseudo-calm where you can at least remove
your head from your hands and gulp a breath of air.
So, let’s imagine for a moment that we’re enjoying that seasonal
moment of nirvana and look back on some of the key moments from 2016 when the
cosy little world of comping leaked into the world at large, or at the very least,
the gutter press.
No, really: it was his prize for being the 100,000th
person to visit Cases4Real, a website selling virtual weapons for video games.
Needless to say, the lad was “delighted” and his mum was “furious” (sample
quote: “He is studying ... They should give us 100,000 roubles [£931]
instead").
The fact that the boy is an actor and the promoter failed to publish the terms and conditions for the “competition” do make the story a
bit fishy, but who needs facts when the copy is this great, right?!
It’s a truism, of course, that you can’t please all of
the people all of the time, but as Walker’s demonstrated, with the right competition mechanic and the enough heavy promotion, you can certainly get a lot of people really stinking mad. Especially if you throw in an extra little
teaser that is (to quote the ASA) “misleading and likely to cause unnecessary disappointment to consumers”.
Judging from the online chatter, some people felt the ASA
went in too softly on this one. By contrast, they stuck the boot into Heinz
- banning its can song ad due to concerns for health and safety. Given that
there was a £5,000 prize running alongside this promotion, I hope they didn’t
put the mockers on that too. [Edit: the winner has now been announced!]
Finally, no summary of 2016 would be complete without 124,109
examples of why asking Joe Public to vote on anything is a terrible idea - that’s how many people voted
to have Boaty McBoatface as the name of the Natural Environment Research
Council’s new polar research ship.
It is of course a matter of comping lore that the
winning entry didn’t actually win (the selected name, Sir Richard Attenborough,
took 10,284 votes), which begs the question, why have an open vote in the first
place? It’s not like such mischief is without precedent (although at least
Greenpeace actually had the brass to give the public what they wanted, namely, a
whale called Mr Splashy Pants).
What will 2017 hold for the wider world of comping then?
Sadly I have no crystal ball, but if I was going to bet on one thing, it’d be people
petitioning their local authority to name a street after Roady McRoadface.
What did I miss?! Please use the comments section below
to remind me about any of the other big stories from 2016
The past few weeks haven’t been so kind to me (Instagram, was it something I said?!), so that probably means it’s time to mix up my game a little. Among other things, I'm giving special consideration to checking out some old haunts.
In the grand scheme of things, Pinterest is one of my oldest stomping grounds. But it's been a while - I haven’t won anything there since my first year of
comping. In fact, it’s pushing two years since I’ve paid it a second's thought, in a comping sense at the very least.
Back in my first year of comping, however, I won a couple of prizes through Pinterest - one for a Father’s Day board and one for a board
dedicated to outdoor living. The Father's Day board was my first ever attempt at a Pinterest comp (and it shows!) but fortune smiled on me as there weren't many entrants; the latter one, however, took a lot more effort, but as it was for a £100 Wild & Wolf voucher and there was plenty of time to work on it, I figured it was worth a crack.
I was still a total novice when I put this board together, and
was yet to see any of the guides to making kick-ass boards (such as Di Coke's tutorial or the tips available to Compers News subscribers),
so there was no way anyone was ever going to think my higgledy piggledy effort had been put together by a
professional...
Where it did succeed, however, was in the comments.
Pinterest is (spoiler!) a highly visual social media channel, but people forget
that a picture says a thousand words, and quite often, that leaves too much to the imagination. In this case, I figured that promoters like folks to engage with their brands, so I made
as many puns as I could based on the words “wild” and “wolf” and the company’s different
product lines ... and you know what? It turns out that someone out there does actually like dad jokes!
Happy days, but as I mentioned, I've not been back to Pinterest for a while now. Perhaps it's about time I reacquainted myself...
Do you ever get dry spells? How do you turn round your luck? And have you seen any good Pinterest comps lately?!
