Part I, The Thinking · Chapter 6

The Five Levers

Why sales promotions work, why they fail, and how to tell which

Something to peel

In September 2025, for the first time since the 1980s, you could play Monopoly at Macca’s without peeling anything. There was no ticket on the cup. The game lived inside the MyMacca’s app: order an eligible item and your tickets arrived automatically, somewhere behind the glass of your phone. On the numbers it was a generous game. Forty-nine million prizes, a prize pool of $718 million, a stated one in three chance of winning and a guaranteed bonus prize every day you ordered. The top prize was a year of mortgage or rent paid.

Twelve months later, Monopoly was not on the menu. In early September 2026 McDonald’s confirmed that Monopoly at Macca’s would not run in Australia that year, and the same pause covered the United Kingdom. The statement was short and gave no reason, and we are not going to invent one. In its place came Golden Deals, a different offer in the app every day, with a competition for a card that buys Macca’s for life.

What the public record does give us is the year before. McDonald’s own announcements set out both campaigns, and they are worth reading side by side.

Read the middle rows together. Prizes fell by about eighteen per cent, the pool shrank a little, and the odds got better. That combination only works one way: fewer tickets in play. When every ticket has to be awarded through an app, the people who do not use the app stop playing, and the people who do win more often. The 2025 game was kinder to its players and smaller than the year before, and those are the same fact.

Then look across the Pacific. In October 2025, the same month Australia went app-only, McDonald’s in the United States brought Monopoly back after nearly a decade away, and made the opposite call. The peel-off pieces stayed on the packaging. The app became the ledger that every piece, physical or digital, had to be scanned into. Same game, same company, same month. One market made the app the whole game; the other made the app the referee and left the game in the customer’s hand. A year later, one of them is running.

Two markets with different histories prove nothing on their own, and we are not claiming they do. What the comparison does is show, unusually cleanly, something we had been noticing for years in our own work: a promotion is not one decision, it is five, and you can improve four of them and still lose the thing that made it work. This chapter is about the five.

A mixing desk, not a checklist

The picture we use in the office is a sound desk. Five faders, each one a thing you can push up or pull down, and a promotion is the mix. You can turn one fader up so far that it drowns the rest. You can push one up and find another has moved with it, because they are wired together underneath. And a promotion can sound wrong with every fader in a sensible place, because the mix is the thing the shopper hears, not any single channel.

We call them the Five Levers, because that is what they are when you are pulling them in a meeting; on the desk they are faders. Three of them belong to the shopper, and you have met them already in chapter 1: Reward, Belief and Friction, the three terms of the sum they run in the aisle. Two belong to the people who build and run the promotion, and the shopper never sees them directly: Liability, which is what the promotion can cost if it runs hot, and Venue, which is where the game is physically met and who has to say yes for it to be met there. The mechanic, prize draw or cashback or instant win or gift, is not a sixth fader. It is the gearbox: the arrangement you land on once the faders are set. Change the gearbox and the faders move, whether you meant them to or not.

[DIAGRAM: fader board]

Five vertical faders labelled Reward, Belief, Friction, Liability, Venue, the first three grouped under “the shopper”, the last two under “the brand”, with the mechanic drawn beneath as the gearbox they sit on. One instance here, empty; the same drawing recurs through Part II with each mechanic’s typical settings. Design Plan fader-board language; no figures on it.

Reward

Is it worth wanting, by this person, on this trip, against what they came in to buy? Chapter 1 covered the size of a reward and the Insult Threshold below which it cannot carry its own claim. The part worth adding here is direction. A reward points at somebody, and the commonest mistake we see is a reward pointed at the user when the person deciding is the buyer. The mortgage prize in the 2025 Monopoly was a good reward precisely because of its direction: it spoke to the person paying for the household, at a time when that was the conversation in every household. Reward is the fader everyone wants to push, and pushing it is the most expensive move on the desk.

The public numbers show which way the market is pushing this fader. Promo-Monitor, an independent tracker of Australian promotions, found that among liquor store promotions the share whose reward was branded fell from 33.6 per cent in 2022 to 25.1 per cent in 2025, while travel and experiences rose from 17.4 to 27.4 per cent and gift cards from 20.3 to 26.2. Brands are pointing the reward away from themselves and at the life of the person buying. Those are counts of what brands chose, not proof of what worked, and the report’s own advice is to choose rewards for the occasion and the brand, not for the size of the pool.

Belief

Do I think I could actually get it? The shopper does not read odds, they feel them, and they feel them against whatever reference point is in front of them. One prize reads as not me. Three reads as possible. A hundred small ones reads as probable. The 2025 Monopoly did everything right on this fader: one in three, a guaranteed win every day, winning made ordinary. If the game had been judged on belief alone it would have been the best Monopoly ever run.

The same count points the way the Rule of Three does. Instant wins, where the shopper finds out at once, grew from 5.4 to 8.4 per cent of liquor promotions between 2022 and 2025, and promotions that pair an instant result with a major draw grew from 3.4 to 9.4 per cent. More chances, and sooner, is belief you can feel. A bigger number on the poster mostly is not. Again, that is what brands chose rather than proof that it worked, and we hold the conclusion as loosely as the rule.

Friction

How much of my time and patience will it cost? Chapter 4 is about this fader in full, and its argument is the one we would most like the reader to keep: friction is not only a tax on entry, it is how you fund generosity, because the people who do not finish are the budget you can move into the reward. The Virgin free flights worked because the gates were set carefully and disclosed up front.

Monopoly is the cleanest example we know of the same fader moving two ways at once. For someone who already used the MyMacca’s app, the 2025 game had less friction than any Monopoly before it: no peeling, no codes, no lost tickets. For everyone else, the app was a wall in front of the game. Friction is not a property of the promotion. It is a property of the promotion and the person, and the same change can lower it for one shopper and raise it for another.

One caution from experience. It is tempting to set promotions that asked for a receipt beside promotions that did not, and conclude something about friction. It does not work, because the receipt promotions tend to be the funded national ones with media behind them. Campaign totals cannot isolate friction; only funnel data, how many started and how many finished, can. We would rather say that than pretend the fader is easier to read than it is.

Liability

What can this cost us if it runs hot? This is the first of the two faders the shopper never sees, and it is the one that decides whether a good idea gets signed. A prize draw has its liability fixed the moment the pool is set. A cashback or a gift with purchase has a liability that moves with every claim. An insured promotion has had its liability sold, before launch, at a price somebody else has set. Chapter 7 has the famous example: a furniture chain that promised to refund every purchase if the Red Sox won the World Series, and had sold the risk to an insurer before the first sofa left the floor.

The other half of this fader is time. An offer built as a campaign, with a sales window of a few months, can keep a claim window open for years if nobody sets a date for it to close, and every such offer is a promise with no end date sitting on a brand’s books. Liability is the fader you set to the ceiling, the ceiling is measured in time as well as money, and the plan is what you expect to spend underneath it, with a decision made in advance about the gap and about the date the promise closes.

Monopoly is where we stop. McDonald’s has said nothing about what the game cost, and the numbers do not tell us. We will not guess.

Venue

Where is the game physically met, and who has to say yes for it to be met there? This is the fader we added last and now think about first. It covers the shelf, the cup, the counter, the display, the app, the bottle shop on a Friday; and it covers the people who decide whether any of those carry your promotion at all, the category manager and the store team, whose test we call S.O.S.: simple, operational, sales. A promotion nobody meets does not exist, however good the other four faders are.

This is where we think Monopoly moved, and it is our reading, not a fact, so take it as one. For thirty-eight years Monopoly at Macca’s was a thing you saw before you played it. The ticket on the cup worked on the person in the queue who had not bought one yet. The peel at the counter was a small piece of public theatre performed millions of times a day, and the board on the fridge kept the game running between visits. In 2025 the game kept every prize and improved every number, and it gave up the one thing that made it an event rather than a feature of an app. A ticket you peel is a promotion. A ticket awarded silently inside an app is a loyalty program wearing a Monopoly hat.

The wider liquor market makes the point plainly. Promo-Monitor, an independent tracker of Australian promotions, counted the liquor store promotions it could find each year from 2022 to 2025. The total barely moved, 649 to 646. The number run by the retailers themselves went from 94 to 222, and in the first half of 2026 retailers ran 128 of 262, very nearly half. Most of that is retailers running promotions for supplier brands, 189 of the 222 in 2025, and most of those are draws entered by scanning a loyalty card. Read through the board, that is the Venue fader acquiring a second hand. When the retailer runs the promotion, the retailer is not only saying yes to the venue; it is choosing the mechanic, the entry route and the data, and the brand is renting a seat at its table. Chapter 14 is about doing that well.

The gearbox

Which brings us back to the mechanic, and to why it is not a fader. Nobody in the McDonald’s story set out to change Venue. They changed the gearbox, from a game played on packaging to a game played in an app, and four of the five faders moved as a consequence. Reward and Belief went up. Friction went down for some people and up for others. Venue went somewhere it had never been. Every time a brief arrives saying we want an instant win, or we want a cashback, it is choosing a gearbox before anyone has looked at the desk, and the faders will move to wherever that gearbox puts them.

So we read in the other order. Set the job first, as chapter 2 asks. Then set the faders for that job and that shopper. Then pick the gearbox that holds them where you want them. The job decides which fader matters most: a Breaker lives on Friction, a Loader on Reward, a Builder on Belief stretched over weeks, a Headliner on Venue and on whether the story survives being retold in a sentence. Part II takes each job in turn and shows which gearboxes tend to hold its faders in place.

The best evidence we have seen for reading in that order comes from an independent count. Promo-Monitor’s study of Australian liquor promotions from 2022 to 2025 picked out twelve suppliers as leaders: the big, regular promoters, every one of which had run an instant win, an insured promotion and a layered design at least once. Among the 105 other suppliers whose brands were promoted, 30.5 per cent had ever used a layered design and 15.2 per cent had ever used insurance. That gap is partly built into how the leaders were chosen, so it is not the interesting number. The interesting number is how often they used those gears. Layered designs were 15.1 per cent of the leaders’ promotions and 13.5 per cent of everyone else’s. The leaders were not running fancier promotions. They had every gear available, and they chose. The report puts it in a line we would happily have written ourselves: “The Leader advantage is not complexity. It is choice.”

Why promotions fail, and how to read the board

In practice the desk is a diagnostic, not a design method, and it is most useful when something feels wrong and nobody can say what. We put the idea on the board and ask, fader by fader, which one is out of tune. Usually one is, and naming it changes the conversation. The prize is fine but nobody believes they will win: that is Belief, and the move is to show more winners, not to buy a bigger prize. The offer is generous but the form is a wall: that is Friction, and the move is to cut every field that is not doing a job. The idea is brilliant but the retailer will not range it: that is Venue, and the move is to give the category team a reason to say yes.

Two rules keep the board honest. First, every fader that is out of tune gets a move, never a verdict. A promotion with Liability set too high is not a bad idea; it is an idea that needs a cap, a gate or a policy, and somebody can price each of those. Second, the faders are wired together, so a move on one has to be checked against the others. Push Reward and Liability moves with it. Add gates to lower Liability and Friction rises. Move the game from the cup to the app and Venue goes somewhere you may not have meant it to. The Dopamine Sandwich from chapter 3 is a single move on two faders, Reward and Belief, and that is why it works so often.

This is also the board Trudy reads when someone pastes an idea into it: the five faders, the one most out of tune, the move that brings it back, and the price of the version that works. We built it that way because it is how we already worked, and because a tool that only says no is not much use to anyone with a brief due on Friday.

Where this leaves the brief

Monopoly at Macca’s will very likely return; a forty-year property does not retire on one quiet September. When it does, the five faders say what to watch for. Reward and Belief were never the problem. Liability we cannot see. Friction depends on who you are. Venue is the question, and it comes down to whether there is something to peel.

Every brief we see has the same five faders on it, whether or not anyone has drawn them. Most of the time, setting them is a matter of judgement and a few honest conversations. Sometimes, though, a client puts something on the table that cannot be done with any setting of the faders at all, and the only way through is to change what the desk is plugged into. That is the next chapter, and it is the one we enjoy most.