Select it. Project it. Expect it. Collect it.

Mostly, I don’t hold out for specific wins. Sure, hope springs eternal, but that’s not quite the same as hardcore expectation. That’s not to say I never follow the mantra - I expected pretty hard for a summer holiday, to the extent that I even renewed the first-born’s passport. But nothing did I collect. Maybe I didn’t project hard enough…

Projecting and expecting is possibly easier with the creative comps. You put more into them - and sometimes you even get to see the competition, so you have an idea of how good you are doing versus the pack. That said, it’s easy to lose objectivity here - the two weeks my wife entered the Chicago Town dance-off I was convinced she was going to be the winner. She didn’t even place on the first week, and I was mad as a cat in a hot tin bath. Not least as it was her first attempt at comping, and she dances a million times better than I do.

But back to the moment: I am, as we speak, once more on max expectation.

Joules recently ran a competition to write a wee children’s book. The prize is not just a £1000 Joules giftcard, but also a Micro scooter (something from my wishlist!) and a heap of Puffin books. By my own broad measure, that makes the prize niiiiiiiiiiiice, at the very least.

Per the Joules logo, the lead character of my story is a hare (not a rabbit - I checked!); he rides a scooter and his best mate is a puffin. Heck, I even named him after the company’s CEO and the puffin after one of their tweed blazers! Too much, perhaps? After all, nobody likes a try-hard … Oh well - the deadline is now well past, so it’s out of my hands … All that’s left to do now is to expect - harder than I’ve ever expected before - till the end of October.

In the meantime, if you’ve got any spare capacity for projecting or expecting on my behalf, I’d be very grateful!

Do you project, expect and collect? Are you waiting to collect anything particular right now? Perhaps you entered this one too? If so, do you fancy sharing your story? You can see mine here if you want to compare!

Small talk

This week I have mostly been chatting with Lorna Beattie, Blogger in Chief at Mission Competition.

For those that don’t know Lorna, she’s a geography undergraduate at Glasgow University. She might have only a couple of years of *serious* comping under her belt, but don’t for a minute think she’s green behind the ears - she’s already won about £7k of prizes this year, including a whole bunch of fancy tech. So yes - I’m very much in her shadow! But here’s the thing: she’s also a very helpful sort. While I’m busy overthinking the minutiae of this noble pursuit, she’s sharing her knowledge about how compers can improve their odds of winning. In other words, on any given day, you will undoubtedly learn more from her than me.

Zoinks. Sorry about that! Tell you what, if you promise to come back, I’ll endeavour to be more useful in the future - even if it means getting Lorna to write my tips for me!

In the meantime, why not have an eavesdrop on our conversation? Who knows, maybe there’s even a nugget of wisdom in there!

A few of my favourite things...

Raindrops and roses and whiskers on kittens. That’s is the last time you’ll hear me mention them in the same breath as like-share and follow/RT comps. I’m not saying I’m above either, but of the numerous grumbles I have volleyed at them, right now I’m focusing my froth at the way they require literally zero interaction with the brand.

Why is this so important? Because if promoters don’t create the right kind of buzz around a brand, they’re focusing their marketing effort on garnering short-term interest that’ll be forgotten as soon as the page is closed - and the brand with it. And I do so hate to see hard work go to waste.

That’s why I prefer creative competitions, especially those that force entrants not just to make an effort, but actually to immerse themselves in the brand.

Sorry, that probably sounds a bit poncey, but let me give a couple of examples.

First, consider the Human Centipede. I’ve little positive to say about this nauseatingly vile franchise, but when the DVD of the last movie was released, I had to applaud the promoters for going the extra mile. That they were giving away the DVD was no surprise. The marquee prize, meanwhile, was a massive fancy telly - a great thing in itself, but as prizes go, not really fizzing with originality. Where the promoters excelled, however, was the entry mechanism. No one was accepted into the draw without first submitting a photograph of themselves on their hands and knees. Why? So the promoter could photoshop them into a giant centipede.

Unique? I’d say so. If there has been another occasion where compers have willingly lined up to have their mouths digitally stitched onto the anuses of complete strangers, then I for one want to know.

I imagine many folks might consider such a comp to be in poor taste. I won’t deny that. But it was certainly an immersive experience that complemented the movie perfectly.

Another campaign I enjoyed was back in 2014 and was run by Hafele, the furniture fittings and architectural hardware company. This was a two-part campaign to raise brand awareness by getting people to talk about the brand, or more specifically, trying to pronounce it.

It was a simple conceit - record yourself saying “Hafele!” and upload it to the Hafele Facebook page. Every entrant was then sent a branded t-shirt and asked to tweet a picture of themselves wearing it in order to be entered into a sweepstakes for £5,000, with something like 50 electric drills for runners-up. Power tools, I concede, aren’t everyone’s bag, but £5,000 is quite some draw.

In a matter of weeks, two of the biggest social media platforms were swimming in pictures and videos about Hafele. And in case you’re wondering how it’s pronounced, as you can see below, they don’t actually care! 

It's the originality of competitions like these that really makes me smile because they help keep the hobby fresh. The truth is, I won nothing in the Hafele draw, and I didn't even enter the Human Caterpillar comp (for logistical rather than moral reasons!), but because of the engagement factor, these campains are indelibly imprinted onto my mind - such is the power of awesome promotion!

Can you remember any other classic promotions? Use the comment section below to refresh my memory!

Wasabi's theory of relativity

Nerd question: I’ve heard lots of compers say that the big one is just around the corner ... but just how big is that biggie?

Personally, I concentrate hardest on the smaller, more frequent wins. It’s not that I dislike big wins (as that would make me a fool) but I do have a fondness for smaller odds, and smaller odds tend to be associated with smaller prizes. The stats certainly bear this out for me: nearly half my wins this year have had a face value no greater than £10.

In the world of seasoned compers, this possibly marks me out as a part-timer. So be it. But it does mean I’m never blasé about £50 prizes, and if I’m lucky enough to score a £100 win you’ll find me high-fiving the mirror and whooping like an immature ambulance. On the few occasions I’ve topped the ton, I’ve actually felt a little unwell, like I’ve been on the waltzer with a belly full of fizzy pop and candy floss. I daren’t imagine what would happen if I won a car, but I’m pretty sure it’d require a doctor.

In any case, the fact remains that for me, a £100 prize is exceptional. As such, I’d call it a biggie. However, if I was winning a prize of that size every week (let me imagine that for a second!) then no doubt my opinion would be different.

In short, “big” is relative.

Does this mean we need an objective metric-style system for measuring prize size?

Certainly, we could always assign a bunch of adjectives to a vague set of boundaries, such as under £50 being “modest” and over £1000 being “jumbo”, but it’s all a bit arbitrary and far too hard to remember.

So, here’s my plan: let’s call all our wins “nice”.  You’ve won a pen? Nice. A luggage tag? Nice. A £100 watch? Ah, you’re right, that is better. Have another “i”. Niice. A £200 giftcard? Niiice. A Hyundai IONIQ Hybrid car? You can type those vowels yourself!

Are you you due a biggie? And how big is a biggie anyway?!

Simply the best?

Someone asks you what your best ever prize is - what do you say? Is it possible to answer that question objectively, or am I just over-analysing? Would you answer that question differently depending who asked you?

To the non-comper, the monetary value of a prize is probably the most obvious way to measure its greatness. To me, however, that’s just accountancy - and quack accountancy at that. Why? Well, for starters, list price and market price just aren’t the same thing. My favourite way to illustrate this is to browse Amazon for fire-sale timepieces - ie watches that are currently on sale with “99% off!” tickets.

The list price of these watches puts them up there with your Omegas and Tag Heuers - only you won’t see any Omegas or Tags here, because the genuine high-end brands don’t do fire sales. Likewise, you won’t see anyone buying these pseudo luxuries at their full price simply because they aren’t really luxury goods.

Anyway, I'm losing sight of my point, which is that using a price-tag as a proxy for awesomeness is a blunt instrument at best. It makes no allowance for aesthetics or utility or any other criteria that might be especially important to the individual.

Of course, you could always refer back to your win-list spreadsheet and grade every prize on a scale of 1-10 using whatever arbitrary criteria are most meaningful to you, but that would be a whole new level of bonkers, pure and simple.

And all this is before we even get to the ‘money can’t buy’ experiences.

So what prompted this rambling train of thought? Simply that I was recently asked what I considered my best prize to be and I froze like the proverbial spot-lit bunny. I’m regularly hamstrung by pointless pedantry, and have terrible bother filling in forms, and in this case I simply couldn’t move beyond ‘best, how?’

Fortunately, I was granted a little grace here, so I’ll share it with you. For me, ‘best’ means most cherished (although I reserve the right to revise this at any point!). And my most cherished win is the iPhone 5 I won during my first summer of comping.

 

Happiest day of my comping life. The promoter hated my pic.

I didn’t have a dozen wins under my belt at this point, and the first thing I remember on receiving the winning notification was a sudden burst of nausea, as if, I don’t know, someone was going undo my win (and indeed, to this day, I never feel like something has been truly won till I’ve unwrapped the parcel!).

After that I was just giddily impatient. I was using an abysmal phone at the time and I hated it like you can’t imagine. It was mediocre when I got it, and 18 months into my contract it was barely even unfit for purpose.

Now, I’m pretty sure the ‘new’ phone was a reconditioned model (the fact that the promoter was a phone repair company was a major clue here) but I didn’t care - from that point, every call I made, every text I sent, reminded me that I was a winner. Remember, this was still my early days of comping, so it was like getting dozens of pep talks a day! On top of all that, I was able to enter so many more photo comps (my previous phone didn’t even have a selfie cam!) that the prize single-handedly pushed my comping game up a gear.

In short, the prize changed my life. It probably wasn’t the most expensive thing I’ve won (given its provenance, I'm just guessing what it would have cost at the time), but I’m pretty sure it made me a better person - if only because I was cursing less!

What does ‘best’ mean to you? What’s your ‘best’ prize and why?

Back on the win wagon

My longest dry spell for well over a year has come to an end! Two (albeit modest) wins in as many days has certainly helped kickstart my mojo and get my game back in to 2nd gear (let's end the car analogy there - I seldom hit fourth and couldn't find fifth with a Haynes manual).

The first win of the last few weeks - which I have a feeling I'll be needing pretty soon

I guess the simple fact is that nothing succeeds like success, and - by extension - nothing sows the seeds of success like successfully sowing success seeds (note to self: stay off the analogies, yeah?). 

So, what are these success seeds? If I’m honest, they’re magic beans by any other name. The first is that positive mental attitude I mentioned previously. Happily, I hadn’t lost this along with my mojo, but as a little celebration of past wins never hurts, I booked afternoon tea and champagne for me and my wife. I won this voucher last December but couldn’t get a daytime babysitter until now. (And given that - as every parent knows - getting a babysitter is a triumph in its own right, I’m adding that to my win list too!)

Cash in the old wins ... for cake!

As for the second seed, that’s the skeleton routine. You know, a super pared-down autopilot routine that maintains some basic semblance of comping normality. For me, that’s basically opening a set of comping bookmarks (local comp searches and daily lotteries). These bookmarks take seconds to open and, at most, minutes to close. Anything I do on top of this - whether catching up with Facebook groups or hashtag searching on Instagram - is a bonus.

Speaking of Instagram, the other thing I've started doing again is comper stalking. I'd forgotten all about this for the last few months. And what a time to forget too - since I last looked, Instagram has much improved this facility, so you're no longer restricted to the last 24 hours of an instagrammer’s life. They kept that update quiet!

To be sure, stalking is also possible on Facebook and Twitter, but I’ve always found it like panning for gold in a haystack (sorry - I promised to stay away from the analogies didn’t I?). The sheer volume of like-share and RT noise makes it nigh impossible to identify the low-entry comps. Instagram by contrast, “has yet to be fully exploited by promoters”. A correlate of this is that it is also yet to be fully populated by compers! It is still possible to find comps with under a hundred entrants. Case in point: this year I have won a Kindle and tickets to see Beyonce on Instagram, and in neither case were there 15 entrants.

As luck would have it too, I’ve been laid up in bed for the last couple of days (doctor’s orders!) so I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about my comping game than I have over the preceding month. That’s not to say I recommend minor surgery as a route to improving one’s winning streak, but if you’re gifted an opportunity, don’t look it in the mouth!

How’s your summer been? Has the hot weather tempered your comping game? How do get yourself back up to speed when your mojo starts to splutter?

Mojo-a-go-go

Compers’ mojo is a funny thing. I’ve lost it before, but last time it was different. Last time was in the deep midwinter. It was my first year of comping and I’d been overdosing on advent competitions. Come January there was a great big hole in my comping day and not enough other distractions to, er, distract me. Coupled with winter blues, I can’t say that I was a bundle of fun. But eventually, the days got brighter and I got sufficiently chirpier to summon some vim and get back in the saddle.

All went well for the next 18 months or so, but then I had the kind of week where business does not go as usual. I prefer to keep sob stories out my comping, so I’ll forgo the details, suffice to say there have been a lot of extraordinary demands on my time, on top of which my cat ran away too. (Sorry if that last bit sounds a bit sob storylike - I do actually sympathise with the mog - he dislikes my children and he dislikes the medicine I have to give him every day, but even so, I can’t help but feel peeved!)

I mention all this not as a cry for sympathy, but rather to illustrate that one can lose one’s mojo for a whole multitude of reasons - not just poor mental health or frustration with a dry spell. Life can broadside us all, and loss of mojo - in the grand scheme of things - is just a detail. A time-limited stain.

Things always settle down eventually. In the meantime, I’ll be looking for life-hacks to get my comping back up to fifth gear. If you have any, do let me know!