Part II, The Mechanics · Chapter 11

Harvesters

First-party data, consent and the competition entry form: how to collect customer data a brand can actually use

A billion codes

In 2006 Coca-Cola in the United States started printing codes inside its caps and fridge packs. Type the code into a website and you earned points, which could be swapped for rewards. The program was called My Coke Rewards, and by August 2010 the company was describing it as about fifteen million registered members who had entered more than a billion codes and redeemed twenty million rewards.

Sit with those numbers for a moment, because almost no Australian brand will ever hold a list like that. Fifteen million people, each of whom had told Coca-Cola who they were, which products they bought and roughly how often, and had come back again and again to say so. If data is the prize, this was the jackpot.

In March 2017 Coca-Cola stopped collecting points. Members had until the end of June to spend what they had, and a new program replaced it, promising, in the company’s words, more personalised rewards delivered in a faster, easier and more engaging way. The company did not say much more than that about why, and we will not guess. What the story shows, whatever the reasons, is that a very large harvest is not the same thing as a use for it. Eleven years and a billion codes in, Coca-Cola decided the program in that form was not the best way to talk to its customers.

Most Harvester briefs we see are written the other way round. They start with how many names the promotion can collect and end, if they get there at all, with what will be done with them. This chapter starts at the other end.

What a Harvester is for

Chapter 2 put it plainly. A Harvester does data. If you want someone’s email, mobile and permission to keep talking, you have to pay for it, and the price is a reward big enough to make the form feel fair. Friction is unavoidable here, so the generosity has to rise to meet it.

The useful data from a promotion comes in three kinds, and they are worth very different amounts. The first is contact: a name, an email, a mobile, with permission to use them. The second is proof: what was bought, where, when and for how much, which is why chapter 2 called a receipt-validated cashback the quiet champion of this job. The third is preference: what the person told you they like, want or intend, which some people now call zero-party data and which is only as good as the question that collected it. A Harvester should know which of the three it is after, because each one changes the form, the reward and the follow-up.

Who owns the data when the retailer runs the promotion

Before designing the form, ask whose form it is.

In Australian liquor, Promo-Monitor counted the share of promotions entered by scanning a retailer’s loyalty card. It rose from 18.6 per cent in 2022 to 30.2 per cent in 2025. Chapter 6 showed the same shift from the other side: retailers running more and more promotions on behalf of supplier brands. For a shopper, scanning a card they already carry is about the lowest-friction entry there is. For a brand, it means the record of who entered sits with the retailer. The brand may get a count, a report, sometimes a targeted send through the retailer’s own channels. It rarely gets the person.

That is not a reason to avoid retailer-run promotions. Often they are the only way to reach the shopper at all, and the Venue they buy is worth more than the data they keep. But it is a reason to be clear-eyed. If the lead job is data, a promotion entered through someone else’s loyalty card is a Harvester for someone else. Either the brief changes, or the design adds a step the brand owns, such as a registration for a bonus, a second-chance draw or a reward claimed on the brand’s own site.

First-party data: the value exchange

Every field on an entry form is a small price the shopper pays, and every field should earn its place. The discipline is simple to say and hard to keep. Ask only for what you will use in the next ninety days. Say why you are asking. Make the reward worth the form. And ask the one question that will change what you do next, rather than five questions that will sit in a column nobody opens.

A brand that runs more than one promotion a year does not have to ask everything at once. The first promotion collects the contact and the proof of purchase. The second, sent to the same person, asks one preference. The third asks another. This is sometimes called progressive profiling, and its virtue is that each question is asked when there is a reason to answer it, and each answer is used before the next is requested.

Proof of purchase: the data that plans the next campaign

Of the three kinds of data, proof is the one brands most often throw away. A receipt uploaded to claim a cashback or enter a draw says which product was bought, in which store, on which day, at what price and, often, with what else. Most promotions check it, approve the entry and never look at it again.

Used properly, it answers questions no survey can. Take a promotion run through several retailers at once, the same idea in the same few weeks, as the Grant Burge Grand Final promotions in chapter 3 were. Because every entry comes with a receipt, the brand can see where the promotion was met and acted on, channel by channel and week by week: which store groups pulled their weight, which pack sizes people bought to enter, which days the entries came in. That is not sales uplift, and chapter 3 is careful to say so. But it is a direct read from data the promotion had to collect anyway, and it belongs to the brand that ran it. Proof data turns one campaign into a plan for the next, and it is the main reason a well-run receipt promotion is often a better Harvester than a competition that collects nothing but an email address.

Consent is part of the data

A contact without permission is not an asset. It is a liability with a name on it.

In July 2020 the Australian Communications and Media Authority announced that Woolworths had paid an infringement notice of $1,003,800, the largest the regulator had issued at the time, for more than five million breaches of the Spam Act. Between October 2018 and July 2019 marketing emails had gone to customers who had already unsubscribed. Woolworths also gave a court-enforceable undertaking to have its email systems independently reviewed. The brand had the data. What it had lost track of was the part of the data that said what it was allowed to do with it.

For a promotion, the consent is captured at the moment of entry and has to travel with the record wherever it goes. In Australia that means an entrant agreeing to receive marketing, separately from agreeing to the terms of the competition; a working unsubscribe in everything sent afterwards; and a record of who agreed to what, and when. Promotions for alcohol carry an age gate as well. Where we can, we build forms with separate tick boxes for separate uses, because a single box that does everything is a box that will be challenged eventually. None of this is exotic. It is simply the part of a Harvester that is easiest to leave to the last day and most expensive to get wrong.

The entrant who enters everything

There is a community in Australia, as in most countries, of people who enter competitions as a hobby. They are good at it, they are perfectly entitled to do it, and they are rarely the customers a Harvester is looking for. A no-purchase, enter-online, win-a-holiday promotion will find them quickly. The list it builds will look large and be, for the brand’s purposes, mostly people who entered because a competition existed rather than because the brand did.

The design answers are the ones earlier chapters have already given. A purchase requirement with proof filters for buyers. A reward that only makes sense to someone in the category, a case of the wine rather than a cheque, filters for interest. A question at entry, the chapter 8 question of whether they have bought the brand before, sorts the list into the people you are trying to keep and the people you are trying to win. And the count of entries stops being the headline, because a smaller list of real buyers with permission is worth more than a larger list of people who enter everything.

From spreadsheet to send

The last mile is where most promotional data dies. For years, in our own business, the handover at the end of a promotion was a password-protected spreadsheet of the people who had opted in, sent to the client after the competition had closed. It was secure and it was compliant. It was also weeks late. By the time a welcome email went out, if one did, the entrant had forgotten entering, and the brand was a stranger writing to them.

We are now moving to a different model: entrant records, with their consents, pushed into the client’s own email platform as people enter, so that the first message arrives while the purchase is still in the fridge. It is a small technical change and a large commercial one. Promo-Monitor’s guide to briefs, quoted in earlier chapters, puts the principle in one line: “Data is only an asset if it’s organised and used.” A Harvester that ends in a spreadsheet has done half its job.

How to measure a data promotion

Chapter 2 gave the Harvester its scoreboard: contacts you can actually use, with permission. That means valid, contactable, consented records, not entries; and, in the end, what those contacts buy after they are contacted, because ruling R11 says the sales a job leads to are what it is finally judged on. A Harvester that collects fifty thousand addresses and is never followed by a send has produced a cost, not an asset.

The numbers to ask for are plain. How many entrants opted in to marketing, as a share of all entrants? How many of those records were valid and unique? How soon after entry was the first message sent? And over the following months, what did the people on the list buy compared with similar buyers who were not? Only the client’s own data can answer the last question, which is why it has to be agreed before launch.

Where this leaves the brief

A data brief usually arrives as a number of names. Send back three questions. What will we do with them in the first ninety days, and who will do it? Whose record will it be: ours, the retailer’s, or the agency’s spreadsheet? And what is the one thing we need to know about each person that we do not know now? Then build the form around those answers, pay for it with a reward worth the effort, keep the consent with the record, and get the first message out while the entry is still fresh.

A Harvester gets you the name and the permission. The next chapter is about what you do with the relationship, and about why the shopper might not want one.