# The Shelf (2026 edition)

By Mark Alexander, founder of Bamboo Marketing and Trevor Services. Published by Bamboo Marketing, Sydney. Canonical text: https://theshelfbook.com.au/chapters/ . One promise: almost every good idea has a version that works.


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# Chapter 1: The Three-Second Truth
_How shoppers decide on a sales promotion_

## One idea, many logos

Between the start of July and the end of August 2026, anyone buying a kitchen or laundry appliance in Australia was walking into a very polite argument. Beko would give you a digital Visa card worth up to two hundred dollars if you bought a washer and a dryer together, claimed online with the serial number and the receipt by the end of September. Omega would give you a prepaid Visa card worth up to five hundred dollars if you spent five thousand, claimed by the middle of August. Buy a fridge from any of seven brands sharing one promotion and a knife set arrived by redemption. The sums were different. The sentence underneath every one of them was the same: spend the money, then get a bit of it back in a different shape.

That is not a competitive set. That is a category that has agreed on a mechanic and stopped arguing about it.

We do not say this to mock anyone. We have built offers like these and will build more. A bonus card on an appliance is a sensible thing, and in a category where the buyer is often not the user, where the person at the counter is furnishing a rental or replacing a dead machine on a Tuesday night or buying a present, a certain reward is exactly what a nervous purchase wants. The trouble is not that the gift card is wrong. The trouble is what happens when everybody on the same floor is right in the same way at the same time. The offer stops breaking a tie. It only stops you losing one. A brand in that position is paying full promotional freight for a defensive outcome, and the budget still leaves the P&L on time.

Two other promotions ran through the same two months and did something different with the same problem. Petbarn, for the tenth birthday of its own Leaps and Bounds range, offered five prizes of ten thousand dollars cash to members who spent forty-five dollars on the range in one transaction, entries open from 30 June to 31 August. Cash. To the human. In a category where the obvious prize is a year of dog food, the money went to the person who pushes the trolley, and the member card made every entry a record the retailer could use. Over at Mattel, a Barbie purchase with the receipt kept went into weekly draws from 9 July to 27 August for double passes to the Australian Ballet’s Nutcracker, with a bigger family experience in the final draw. The consumer is a child. The prize is an evening the parent takes the child to, which is a reward pointed squarely at the person holding the wallet, dressed as a reward for the person who is not.

Neither of those is a bigger gift card. Both of them cost real money and neither is automatically cheaper than a bonus card; a capped prize pool and an open redemption liability simply have different shapes, which is a conversation for chapter 4. What they have in common is that somebody asked a question the appliance floor had stopped asking: who, exactly, is standing in the aisle, and what are they actually weighing up in the few seconds they give us?

That question is the whole of this chapter, and most of the book.

### What Is A Sales Promotion?

A sales promotion is a short-term offer that gives a shopper an extra reason to buy now rather than later, or this brand rather than that one: a prize draw, an instant win, a cashback, a gift with purchase, a bonus pack, a reward for coming back. In Australia the ones run as competitions are usually called trade promotions, and the ones decided by chance are trade promotion lotteries, regulated state by state, with a permit still needed in some places. This book uses sales promotion for the whole family. Its subject is the part the definitions leave out: why some promotions move stock and others only move paperwork.

## The bottle that danced

About ten years ago we built a promotion for a drinks brand that we were certain would perform. It was beautiful. A bespoke app, augmented reality, point your phone at the bottle and a character climbed out of the label and danced on the table in front of you. We spent properly on the build and more again on media. The client loved it. We loved it.

Launch day, we sat around the dashboard waiting for the servers to groan. By five in the afternoon there were fourteen downloads. By the end of the week, a hundred and two. The cost per download does not need stating; you can do it in your head, and we did, repeatedly, for some weeks.

Nothing about that promotion was badly made. The app worked. The character danced. What never happened was the moment it was all for. Someone standing in a bottle shop at half past five on a Friday, drinks for the weekend in one hand and a phone in the other, looked at a shelf wobbler inviting them to download something, and could not tell in the time they were prepared to give it what they would get for the bother. They did not say no. They did not say anything. They picked up the bottle next to ours, or ours without the app, and went home, and the dashboard stayed quiet.

We had built the thing for the people in the room: the client, the agency, the awards jury that never got to see it. The shopper had not been consulted, and the shopper had the only vote that counted. We have a name for this in the office that is not fit for print, and a printable one too, which is the vanity trap. Everyone who has worked in this trade for long enough has a dancing bottle somewhere in the drawer. Ours happened to be the one that taught us to look at the aisle before we look at the idea.

## How shoppers decide on a promotion

Stand in a supermarket aisle and watch people meet a promotion. It is over before you have focused. They see the flash, win a car, ten dollars back, scan to enter, and in a couple of seconds they have either reached for their phone or kept walking. Nobody reads the terms. Nobody weighs it up in any way they could describe afterwards. And yet a judgement has been made, and it is a surprisingly consistent one, and a lot of money gets compressed into it. Months of creative, a media plan, a prize budget, a retailer negotiation, all spent in the time it takes a trolley to roll past a wobbler.

Years of watching that moment, and then watching the entry numbers that followed it, left us with a rough picture of what is happening inside it. The shopper is asking three things at once, and the three combine in a particular way.

Do I want that? Do I believe I would actually get it? And how much of my time, and my patience, is it going to cost me?

We ended up writing it as a sum, because a sum is a useful way to argue in a meeting, and the sum has a name in our shop that has stuck. The 3-Second Equation: Reward, multiplied by Belief, divided by Friction. The shopper is not doing arithmetic. We are, on their behalf, to work out why they walked past.

The multiplication matters, and it is the part people most often get wrong when they repeat the thing back to us. Reward and Belief do not add up; a wonderful prize that nobody believes they could win does not come out as half wonderful. It comes out as nothing, because anything multiplied by zero is nothing, and nothing divided by any amount of effort is still nothing. A car in a single draw that reads as impossible is, at the shelf, exactly as persuasive as no car. That is not a judgement on cars. It is a statement about where the zero sits.

Reward is the term that feels easiest and is not. The instinct is that bigger must mean better, and it does not work like that at all. What matters first is whether the reward clears the bar of being worth wanting by this person, on this trip, against what they came in to buy. A reward can also be too small to carry its own claim. We started calling that point the Insult Threshold after watching a run of cashbacks die quietly: a two-dollar saving that wants a receipt uploaded and an account created is not a small win, it is a small annoyance, and shoppers answer annoyance with silence rather than complaint. And the reward has a direction as well as a size, which is the whole lesson of the appliance floor. A card worth the same as everyone else’s card has size and no direction. A night at the ballet for the parent has both.

Belief is the term brands most often forget they can move. A shopper looks at one big prize and concludes, without articulating it, not me, never me. The odds feel like zero whether they are or not. Three prizes on show and the same shopper thinks, possible. A hundred small ones and they think, probable. Same budget, a different sense of whether it is worth a go, and the entry numbers move accordingly. There is a whole craft of shaping a prize pool to change what people believe about their chances, and it has its own chapter later. For now it is enough to notice that the shopper runs this term against the way the offer is shown, not against the published odds, which they will never read.

Friction is where good promotions quietly bleed, and also where they are quietly funded, and chapter 4 is about holding both of those in your head at once. At the shelf it is simpler. Every field, every step, every create-an-account-to-continue is a small tax, and the taxes compound. But the useful question was never how few fields can we get away with. It is how much effort this reward and this belief have earned the right to ask for. A trip for four can ask for a receipt and a form. A five-dollar cashback cannot, and will be told so.

Hold the three together and the dancing bottle reads itself. The reward was a cartoon; wanted by us, unclear to them. Belief hardly came into it, because there was nothing to win. And the friction was an app download in a bottle shop, standing up, with the weekend waiting. Any one of those would have slowed it down. All three together produced fourteen downloads by five o’clock.

## Three people in the aisle

The sum is run by a person, and it turns out there are three people to think about, and only one of them is physically in the aisle.

The first is the shopper: the one holding the wallet, the one whose three seconds we have been describing. The second is the consumer: the one who will eat it, drink it, wear it, feed it to the dog. In a lot of categories these are the same person and the distinction is a seminar topic. In the categories where promotional budgets run largest, appliances, pet, kids, gifting, beer bought for a barbecue someone else is hosting, they are different people, and only one of them is present when the decision gets made. The consumer research is usually the only research in the room when the mechanic is chosen, so the prize ends up designed for the user by default, and the user is not in the shop. The dog cannot read the pack. The child is not at the counter. The question that fixes this is not who is our shopper, which gets answered with a demographic and a shrug. It is: what does the buyer get out of this product if they never use it? If the honest answer is nothing, then the reward is carrying the whole load, and it has to be worth something to a buyer rather than a user. Petbarn answered that question with cash to the human. Mattel answered it with a night out for the parent.

The third person is not in the aisle on the day at all. They were there months earlier, in a category review, deciding whether your promotion would be in the aisle in the first place. The category manager at the retailer is measured on units, basket, incremental sales and whether your activity grows the category or just shuffles share around inside it, and they run their own fast judgement that has nothing to do with affection for your brand. Can a shopper understand this in three seconds? Can staff run it without ringing head office? Does it move units on this trip, for this buyer? We call that test S.O.S., for simple, operational, sales, and the person who applies it the Gatekeeper, and they have their own chapter in Part III because they deserve one. The point for now is that the three-second sum gets run twice before a single entry arrives: once by the shopper on the day, and once, in a different dialect, by the person who decided whether the shopper would ever see it.

Design for the consumer and you can lose both of the other two at once. Design for the shopper and the Gatekeeper tends to come with you, because a promotion a shopper understands in three seconds and acts on in sixty is also a promotion that moves units on the trip, which is the sentence a category manager wants to hear.

## What the numbers can say, and what they cannot

We run and fulfil a lot of these promotions on the Trevor platform, so we can see the far side of the three seconds: every entry and every claim. You will not find one of those numbers in this book. They belong to our clients, and behind them are our clients’ customers. Every figure here about a real promotion comes from somewhere you can check for yourself: the published terms, the promotion page, the brand’s own announcement, a company’s results or independent research.

What running them teaches can be said without the numbers. The first lesson is that an always-on program and a six-week promotion are different animals. A gift-with-purchase offer that stays open for years will collect more claims than any short promotion could, and put the two in one table and every other figure on the page stops meaning anything. The second is that comparing mechanics across categories mostly tells you about the categories. An appliance cashback is claimed by people who have just spent thousands of dollars; a wine draw is entered by people who spent twenty on a Friday. The comparisons worth trusting hold the category still: the same brand, the same idea, the same few weeks, one setting changed.

What no count of entries can tell you is how many sales the promotion caused. Some of the people who claimed were going to buy anyway, and a receipt cannot tell you which. That figure, the extra stock that moved because the promotion was there, lives in the brand’s own sell-out data, set against the weeks before and after, and for most jobs it is the number a promotion is finally judged on; a promotion built for fame is judged on fame, which chapter 2 comes to. Chapter 15 is about getting the sales number. What entries and claims can show is which designs got the most people to act at the shelf, and a design that gets more people to act has more chances to sell something they would not otherwise have bought.

What all of that does support is the thing this chapter is actually about. The three terms are not three separate problems to be solved by three separate people. A prize team polishing the reward while a digital team builds the form and a sales team negotiates the shelf will produce a promotion in which each term has been optimised and the sum has quietly collapsed. The equation earns its keep by making you hold all three at once and be honest about which one is dragging.

## What the sum is for

It is worth being clear about what the 3-Second Equation is not. It is not a predictor. It will not tell you the entry count. Promotions are a creative trade; you cannot always tell in advance what will work, and the occasions when the trade surprises us are the reason we are still in it. What the sum does is narrower and more useful. When a promotion feels off and nobody in the room can say why, it tells you which term has gone to zero. And once you know which term is dragging, you know what the move is, and the conversation changes from whether to run the idea to how to run a version of it that works.

Take it back to the appliance floor. A dozen logos, one mechanic, one answer. The reward term is identical everywhere, so it cancels; the belief term is as high as it gets, because the reward is certain; the friction is near enough the same claim form with a different logo. Everyone is running the same sum and getting the same result, and the only way to change the result is to change a term the others have not touched. Bidding two hundred and fifty against two hundred changes nothing except the shopper’s habit of waiting for the offer. Pointing the reward at the buyer instead of the user changes the direction of the first term. Showing three things to win instead of one changes the second. Letting the claim happen at the counter instead of at home changes the third. None of those is a verdict on the gift card. Each of them is a version.

That is the posture of this book, and it is as good a place as any to say so. Almost every good idea has a version that works. The craft is finding it, and the three terms are where we start looking. In our office that craft has always had a name, half a joke and half not: the dark art. It is not dark because anything is hidden. The web has a phrase, dark patterns, for designs that bury the catch, and that is the opposite of what we mean; every condition in a promotion we build is stated before the shopper is asked to want anything. It is dark the way any trade is dark from the outside. It is years of knowing which settings work together, which rules moved since the last job, and where the give is in an idea that looks impossible on paper. This book is the art written down, with the lights on. The next chapter is about the one thing a promotion should be trying to do, because the terms get weighted differently depending on the job. The two after that are about who the shopper is when they run the sum, and about friction, which turns out to pay for everything. Then the full board of levers arrives, five of them, and the moment a client puts something impossible on the table and asks us to make it work.

But it starts here, in the three seconds a trolley takes to pass a wobbler, with a person we have not met deciding whether we were worth the bother.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**What is the 3-Second Equation in promotional marketing?** The sum a shopper runs in the few seconds a promotion gets at the shelf: Reward multiplied by Belief, divided by Friction. Do I want it, do I believe I would get it, and what will it cost me in time and patience. The terms multiply, so a reward nobody believes they can win comes out as nothing. From The Shelf by Mark Alexander of Bamboo Marketing.

**Why multiply Reward and Belief instead of adding them?** Because belief at zero kills the offer whatever the prize. A car in a single draw that reads as impossible is, at the shelf, as persuasive as no car.

**What is the Insult Threshold?** The point where a reward is too small to carry its own claim process. A two-dollar saving that wants a receipt uploaded and an account created reads as admin rather than value.

**What is the difference between a shopper and a consumer in promotion design?** The shopper holds the wallet and is in the aisle; the consumer uses the product and often is not. In appliances, pet, kids and gifting they are different people, and the reward has to be worth something to the buyer.

**Do entries and claims show whether a promotion increased sales?** No. Entries and claims are purchases the promotion can see. Whether the promotion caused extra sales is measured in the brand's own sell-out data against the weeks before and after.


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# Chapter 2: One Lead Job
_The six objectives of a sales promotion, and why one must lead_

## Buy two, buy three

In August 2026 Electrolux put one sentence at the centre of a cashback: buy two participating Electrolux appliances in the same transaction and get fifteen per cent of the price back; buy three or more and get twenty. Nobody has ever bought a dishwasher to get cash. The offer did not exist to make anyone want an appliance. It existed to turn one appliance into two or three in a single trip, across ovens, washers, dishwashers, fridges and vacuums, in a home that is usually furnished in pieces, over years, from whoever is on promotion that month. The threshold was the job. The reward stepped up with the trade-up. The claim was a form and a receipt, which a person who has just spent a few thousand dollars will do without complaint, and which a person buying a kettle would not.

Every claim on it is a bigger basket: two or more appliances, bought in one transaction, with the receipt to prove it. How many people claimed is not ours to say; those are Electrolux’s customers and Electrolux’s numbers, and the published terms are all this book uses. But read the terms and you could not mistake what the promotion was for. The step from fifteen to twenty per cent is a sentence written to one shopper: the one already holding two appliances, deciding whether the third is worth doing now. Put the question to anyone who read the offer and you would get the same answer in the same words: a bigger basket. That is rarer than it sounds, and it is the subject of this chapter.

## The wish-list brief

Here is a brief we have received, in one form or another, more times than we could count. The promotion should drive trial among people who have never bought us. It should reward the people who already do. It should lift basket size. It should collect first-party data, because the CRM team has a target. And it should make the brand feel a bit more fun, because the last campaign was a cashback and the brand team is tired of cashbacks. One mechanic, one prize pool, one eight-week window.

We do not read that as confusion. We read it as ambition, written down by people who have five things they would like to be true. The trouble is not the wanting. The trouble is that a single offer cannot send five signals to five different shoppers without blurring all of them, because the five things pull in different directions and the shopper only hears one sentence. The person who has never bought you needs the ask to be almost nothing. The CRM team needs the ask to be a form. Put both on the same pack and the stranger you most wanted is the first to walk, and the form is filled in by the people who were buying anyway.

You can see what happens when nobody settles the question by looking at what gets launched. On a morning in the middle of 2026 we counted 137 live promotions across the categories we track, and 89 of them were games of chance: 49 single prize draws and 40 instant wins. Two were cashbacks. That is not a reading of what shoppers want. It is a reading of what a finance team will sign, and of what a brand team reaches for when the promotion has not yet been told what it is for. A prize draw is the safe default. It is flexible, its cost is fixed the moment the pool is set, and it can be argued into almost any brief after the fact. Which is exactly why it ends up in so many briefs where a different mechanic would have done the actual job.

## Six jobs: the objectives of a sales promotion

Over enough campaigns the wish-list sorts itself into six things a promotion can actually do, and we gave them trade names because the trade names are quicker in a meeting than the marketing words.

A Breaker does trial. It asks a stranger to abandon a brand they trust for one purchase, which is the hardest thing in marketing, and so it can afford almost no friction and no questions. The free flights in chapter 4 were a Breaker: a reason to connect with Virgin rather than the carrier you had, and the work came after the decision, not before it.

A Builder does frequency. You already have the buyer; they buy monthly and you need them weekly, or they buy at Christmas and you need them in March. The coffee card is the oldest Builder in the world and still works because the progress is visible, which is the only rule a Builder has.

## [STORY NEEDED: the cereal move]

The brief names a cereal brand that moved from a gift in every pack to a gift in one pack in three. It belongs here, as the Builder story: what the every-pack gift was doing to repeat purchase, what changed when the gift became a chance, and what the numbers did. Needed from Mark: whether the brand can be named, the year, and whatever repeat or velocity figure exists in the record. Without a figure the story still works; with a figure it becomes the chapter’s best page. Client stories only from public facts, or with the client’s written permission; no client data (ruling R15).

A Loader does basket. The transaction is happening; it is too small. The Electrolux cashback above is a Loader, and so is every buy-two-get-something and every tiered cashback in whitegoods. The rule is that the reward has to feel worth more than the cost of the trade-up, and the threshold has to be one a real shopper can reach on a real trip.

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; the generosity has to rise to meet it. A receipt-validated cashback is the quiet champion of this job, because it returns the product, the retailer, the date and the price paid, which is a plan for the next campaign rather than an email address and a stated intention.

A Keeper does loyalty. It talks to the people who already buy you, and it trades on exclusivity rather than face value. Airline status is the model, and the lesson from airline status is that the feeling of being inside counts for more than the arithmetic of what being inside is worth.

A Headliner does fame. Its job is to make the brand the thing people talk about, and the person it most needs to reach is often not in the shop at all: it is the journalist, the feed, the person at the barbecue who hears the story second-hand. Burger King sold a Whopper for a cent, but only through its app and only within six hundred feet of a McDonald’s, and the friction was the joke. Snickers in Australia got cheaper as the internet got angrier. Domino’s filled potholes to protect the pizza on the drive home. None of them would look clever judged on entries, and none of them were built to be. The rule a Headliner has is that the idea must survive being retold in one sentence by someone who did not see the ad, because a story nobody can repeat earns no coverage. And the honest line we hold it to is that fame which never finds its way back to the brand at the shelf is an advertisement, not a promotion, and should be priced like one.

Petbarn’s Leaps and Bounds promotion from chapter 1 is worth reading again with those six in mind. Forty-five dollars on the range in one transaction, member card scanned, five chances at ten thousand dollars. The threshold makes it a Loader. The member card makes every entry a record. Nobody was asked to do anything they were not already doing at the counter, and that is the detail this chapter turns on.

## One leads, one may ride

The first edition of this book said pick one job and had a box called the Kill Switch, which said you cannot run a campaign that drives trial and harvests data, because trial needs no friction and data needs friction. We were half right, and the half we got wrong is the half that matters in practice, because real briefs almost never have one objective and real promotions almost always do two things whether you planned the second or not.

So the rule we actually use now is this. One job leads. A second job may ride along, on two conditions. The reward has to pay for whatever extra the ride-along asks, and the ride-along must not change what the shopper is asked to do at the shelf. Petbarn passes both: basket leads, data rides, and the card was being scanned anyway. The flights passed both: trial led, and two things rode along. The claim form that captured a customer’s details rode because a five-hundred-dollar flight pays for a form several times over, and the fame rode because a free flight with a phone plan was the kind of offer people told each other about without being asked. The Electrolux cashback passed both: basket led, and the verified purchase data from the claim rode along at no extra ask.

The test for whether a second job is riding or driving is whether the lead job’s shopper would notice it. If the stranger you wanted to try you meets a form, data is not riding along. It is driving, and trial is in the back seat wondering where it is going. That is the version of the Kill Switch that survives: not that two jobs cannot share a promotion, but that two jobs cannot share the ask. When a brief insists on both, the honest answer is not no. It is to sequence them: take the trial on the pack with nothing asked, and take the data a week later, after use, when the reward for answering can be the thing they now know they want. The free sample with a survey attached is the commonest version of this conflict we see, and the fix is the same every time. Sample now. Ask later. Pay for the asking.

## What the job does to the sum

The reason the job has to be settled before the mechanic is that the job decides which term of the three-second sum gets the weight. A Breaker lives or dies on friction, because the reward for a stranger can only ever be modest and belief barely enters it; every field is a tax on the one behaviour you are paying to create. A Harvester has earned the right to ask, so friction is permitted and reward has to climb to meet it. A Loader is a reward term problem: the trade-up has a price and the reward has to clear it visibly. A Builder is belief stretched over time: the progress has to look as real on the third visit as it did on the first. A Keeper is reward of a particular shape, the kind that is worth more for being scarce. A Headliner sits outside the sum altogether, because the person it most needs to reach is not standing at the shelf: it is the person who will hear about it tomorrow.

Get the job wrong and you will tune the wrong term with great care. We have watched teams spend a fortnight on a form for a trial promotion and nobody asked why a trial promotion had a form. We have watched a loyalty offer argued down to a cash value that made it feel like a coupon, which is the one thing a loyal customer did not want to be handed. The mechanic is not the strategy. The job is the strategy, and the mechanic is how you pay for it.

The job also decides what you count afterwards, which is the part most post-mortems skip. A Breaker is judged on how many people bought for the first time. A Builder is judged on whether they came back sooner. A Loader is judged on the size of the basket. A Harvester is judged on contacts you can actually use, with permission. A Keeper is judged on who stayed. A Headliner is judged on whether people talked, wrote and went looking: coverage, conversation, search, and the tone of the retailer on the phone the following week. Sales sit underneath five of those six, and should be measured from the client’s own sell-out data wherever the client will share it. For a Headliner the honest scoreboard is fame, and judging it on entries is like judging a billboard on how many people stopped to touch it.

## What the market’s numbers say

Promo-Monitor, an independent tracker of Australian promotions, sorts liquor store promotions by what they give the shopper. In 2025, 65.2 per cent were a chance to win, up from 57.2 per cent in 2022, while promotions with a certain or immediate reward fell from 39.4 to 25.4 per cent. Those are counts of promotions, not of sales, and they cannot say which job each one was doing. But a liquor draw is generally entered by buying, with a receipt or a scanned loyalty card, so the number is another way of saying that the Australian promotion is very often a Loader or a Builder wearing a prize draw. Whether it did that job sits in the brand’s sell-out data, and chapter 15 is about getting it. The job also changes what a fair comparison looks like. A Loader in appliances and a Builder in wine produce entry counts that cannot be set side by side, because the people behind them are spending very different amounts for very different reasons. Judge each promotion against its own job, and against the last promotion that did the same job in the same category.

There is a number this section would like and does not have: how far real claims land from the forecast on a cashback. Brands do not publish it, and the ones we see are not ours to print. The principle stands without it, because it is arithmetic rather than evidence: a claim estimate on a Loader is the most the promotion can cost, not what it will cost, so budget the full liability and decide in advance what happens to the gap. Chapter 4 has that decision and chapter 7 the gap.

## The job that is not there

There is one more answer to the question, and it is the one nobody wants to write in a brief: there is no job. The promotion is in the calendar because there was one last year, the trade expects one, the budget line exists and the brand team would feel exposed without it. Those are reasons to run a promotion. They are not jobs, and a promotion with no job will be judged on the only thing left to judge it on, which is whether it ran smoothly.

We learned this by watching what happened when a client stopped. Footfall did not change. Takings did not change. Marketing spend dropped.

## [STORY NEEDED: the pause]

The three sentences above are Mark’s, from his Trudy post, and they are the best three sentences in the chapter. The story around them is needed: who paused (named or “a client”), what was paused and for how long, what was measured, and what the client did next. Also whether the pause was our recommendation or theirs, because the chapter reads differently either way. Client stories only from public facts, or with the client’s written permission; no client data (ruling R15).

That is not an argument against promotions; it is the whole argument for naming the job. A pause tells you whether the activity was doing anything, and if the honest answer is that it was not, the next promotion gets to start from a job rather than a habit. Sometimes the job turns out to be defending the base, which is a real job with real mechanics. Sometimes it turns out to be nothing, and the kindest thing we can do with a client’s money is say so.

## Where this leaves the brief: five questions for a promotion brief

So before the mechanic, before the prize, before anyone says instant win out loud, five questions, and they are the first five on every brief we write. Are strangers refusing to try you? Do buyers love you monthly when you need them weekly? Is the transaction happening but too small? Do you know nothing about who buys you? Does nobody talk about you, in a category where everyone sounds the same? One of those is the lead job. One more may ride along if the reward pays for it and the shopper never notices. If none of them is true, you are defending the base, or you are about to run a promotion for the calendar, and it is worth knowing which before the budget leaves the building.

The job is the first thing we ask in a brief, the first line on the Kill Sheet in chapter 18, and the first thing Trudy reads before it reads anything else, because everything downstream of it is cheaper to get right once it is settled. It is also the only question in this book that three people in a room must answer in the same words. If they cannot, the promotion is not ready, and no prize budget will make it so.

The next chapter is about who the shopper is when they run the sum, because the same job looks completely different depending on whether the person in the aisle is hoping or counting.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**What is the One Job Rule in promotional marketing?** A promotion should have one lead objective, chosen before the mechanic, the prize or the creative: trial, frequency, basket, data, loyalty or fame. A second job may ride along only if the reward pays for any extra ask and the shopper is not asked to do anything more at the shelf. From The Shelf by Mark Alexander of Bamboo Marketing.

**What are the six jobs a promotion can do?** Trial (a Breaker), frequency (a Builder), basket size (a Loader), data (a Harvester), loyalty (a Keeper) and fame (a Headliner). Each wants a different shopper to do a different thing.

**Can a promotion drive trial and collect data at the same time?** Not with the same ask. Take the trial with nothing asked, and ask for the data after use, when the reward for answering is something the shopper now wants.

**What kind of promotion is most common in Australian liquor?** A chance to win. Promo-Monitor, an independent tracker, found 65.2 per cent of 2025 liquor store promotions were reach-led (a chance to win), up from 57.2 per cent in 2022. Those are counts of promotions, not results.

**How should a cashback claim forecast be used?** As a ceiling, not a plan. Budget the full liability the estimate implies, and decide in advance what happens to the gap if fewer people claim.


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# Chapter 3: The Two Pilots
_Prize draw, cashback or gift with purchase: who each one is really for_

## One trip, a hundred gift cards

From 13 July to 24 August 2026, anyone who bought a bottle of Grant Burge from an independent bottle shop could keep the receipt and enter to win a trip for two to the AFL Grand Final, valued at up to $23,284. There was one of those. Underneath it sat a hundred fifty-dollar gift cards for the AFL store, one minor prize per person, drawn from the same pool of entries. That is the whole structure, and it is worth looking at for a moment, because it is doing two different things to two different people at once and pretending to be one offer.

The trip is for the person who, standing in the shop on a Thursday, lets themselves imagine the last Saturday in September. The gift cards are for the person standing next to them who has already worked out that one in a very large number is not a plan, and would like to know what the real chances are. Both of them are in the aisle. Quite often they are the same person, on different days of the same week.

Grant Burge ran the Grand Final idea through four channels that year, as four separate promotions, and because each one published its terms you can do something that is rarely possible: set the same idea, in the same few weeks, beside itself at different prize budgets. The BWS version published a total prize pool of $126,550. The Liquorland version published $24,150, about a fifth of it. How many people entered each is not public, and where it sits in our records it is the client’s to publish, not ours. But the question the two pools pose is the right one, and it is the one this chapter is about: would five times the prize money bring five times the shoppers? In our experience it rarely comes close, and the reason is in the aisle, not in the prize table.

Channels are not comparable footprints, and any comparison between them has to say so: BWS has many more doors than Liquorland, and either has more than a network of pubs, so some of any gap is distribution doing the work, not persuasion. That reinforces the point rather than softening it. If distribution does the heavy lifting, the prize pool does not. And the prize pool is the thing the planning meeting spends longest arguing about, because it is the easiest number in the room to have an opinion on and the hardest to be wrong about in public.

So the chapter is about the two people in the aisle, what each of them is actually buying when they enter, and why the number the meeting argues over is rarely the one either of them reads.

## Prize draw or cashback: hope and greed

Years of watching entry data arrive from two kinds of mechanic left us with a picture that has stuck. Put a prize draw and a cashback side by side at the same value, in the same category, on the same shelf, and they ask completely different things of the person looking at them. One says: buy this, and you might win something out of proportion to what you paid. The other says: buy this, send us the receipt, and we will give you thirty dollars back. Same budget. Different person being spoken to.

We call them the two pilots, and in the office they are the Gambler and the Accountant. The Gambler wants a shot at something disproportionate, decided by luck rather than effort, and the feeling of being in with a chance is a large part of what they are buying. Instant wins, prize draws and sweepstakes are built for the Gambler. The Accountant wants a known return for a known action, something they could explain to the person they live with. Cashbacks, gifts with purchase, bundles and thresholds are built for the Accountant. Neither pilot is wrong and neither is more sophisticated than the other. They are different shoppers, or the same shopper depending on what else is riding on the week, and every mechanic we have ever built is an argument aimed at one of them.

The first thing to say about the Gambler is that they do not read odds. They feel them. One big prize reads as not me, never me, whatever the published probability turns out to be, and the entry numbers reflect the feeling rather than the arithmetic. We came to the Rule of Three the slow way, by watching the same budget perform differently depending on how it was shown: one prize reads as impossible, three reads as possible, a hundred reads as probable. It is a rule of thumb from running these, not a measured effect, and we hold it loosely. The academic work that comes closest, from the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, is about prize count rather than value, and it found that people deciding whether to enter a sweepstake largely cannot judge whether the number of prizes on offer is good or bad when they see it on its own. Within a normal range, more prizes did not make them feel luckier.

That sits awkwardly against our rule of thumb, and we would rather say so than pretend it does not. The way the two fit together is that the Gambler reads odds against a reference point, and only against one: a competing offer on the next shelf, a category habit, a visual that makes the count concrete, a grid of gift cards next to a single trip. Absent a reference point, the number is just a number. So the practical version of the Rule of Three was never put more prizes in the pool. It is make the odds legible, which is a different job, and only one of the two costs prize money.

There is a darker version of the same finding. For twelve years McDonald’s Monopoly in the United States had almost no legitimate big winners, because the security officer who transported the winning pieces was palming them and selling them on, and nobody noticed until an anonymous tip. Shoppers could not feel the difference between long odds and zero, because there is no difference to feel. We mention it not to be grim but because it is the cleanest demonstration there is that the Gambler is buying a feeling, and the feeling has to be designed.

The Accountant is calmer and not, it turns out, as unemotional as they sound. The research on cashback is clear that people do not file a rebate as their own money returned; they treat it as something closer to new money, and spend it differently, which is why a cashback can pull harder than a discount of the same value and why the Accountant’s certainty has a small dopamine hit of its own. Smaller than the Gambler’s, steadier, and real. What the Accountant will not forgive is being made to work for too little. That is the Insult Threshold from chapter 1 again: a two-dollar saving behind a receipt upload and an account is not a modest win, it is admin, and the Accountant answers admin by not bothering and remembering that they did not bother.

## The third seat

For a long time we talked about the two pilots as if they covered everyone in the aisle, and the appliance floor in chapter 1 is what taught us they do not. Both pilots assume the shopper is buying for themselves: the Gambler is chasing a thrill they will feel, the Accountant is calculating a return they will receive. Put a gift buyer in the seat and neither pilot is flying. The person choosing a present on the Friday before Father’s Day is not chasing dopamine and is not doing sums for themselves. They are discharging an obligation under time pressure, and what they want is confidence that it will land well.

That shopper responds to anything that makes the gift look and feel like more than they paid, which is what a bonus gift does well, and which is also what every brand on the same floor discovers at the same time. The third seat explains the $200 problem better than either pilot can: the certainty mechanic took over appliances in July and August because it is right for the gift buyer, and a mechanic that is right for everybody stops selecting anybody. It also explains Petbarn’s cash and Mattel’s ballet tickets. Neither was aimed at the pilot you would expect. Both were aimed at the person holding the wallet, who was buying for somebody else.

## The Dopamine Sandwich: how to structure a prize pool

Back to the trip and the hundred gift cards, because that structure has a name in our shop and it is the answer to the question a lot of briefs are really asking: can we have both? One or two large, low-probability prizes for the Gambler, wrapped around a much larger tier of small, high-probability prizes for the Accountant. We call it the Dopamine Sandwich. The big prize does the recruiting. The tier underneath is what makes the odds feel worth the entry once the shopper is actually standing at the shelf doing the maths, because both numbers are sitting in the same pool and the shopper can see that their real chance is at the gift card, not the trip.

Two things make it work and both are easy to get wrong. First, it is one mechanic with one entry and one job. The tiering is inside the prize pool, not inside the promotion. Running a cashback and a sweepstake side by side and hoping the shopper picks a lane is not a sandwich, it is two promotions sharing a pack. Second, the boring tier has to be fought for. A trip to the Grand Final makes a better slide than a grid of fifty-dollar vouchers, and it is the image that gets a promotion approved by a category manager looking at a deck rather than living inside the entry data afterwards. That is a fair reason to lead with the big prize. It is not a reason to let the Accountant’s tier get cut late, as an afterthought, which is how we have watched it go more often than we have watched it go on purpose.

And there is a way the sandwich gets used as cover for not deciding. If the headline prize is doing trial, the participation tier is doing data and the entry mechanic is doing loyalty, that is not a sandwich. That is three campaigns in a trench coat, and it shows up later as a promotion nobody can explain simply to a retailer or a compliance reviewer. Chapter 2 applies: one job leads, the tiers serve it, and the two pilots are two ways of selling the same thing to the same aisle.

There is a quieter reason to like the shape, and it is legal rather than psychological. A law passed by the federal parliament in August 2026, the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Act, narrows the exemption that lets trade promotions run draws without being treated as gambling, from 1 January 2027 (chapter 16 has the detail). Its target is the business where the customer is really paying for a chance, a subscription or membership fee that exists mainly to fund recurring draws for big prizes, and not the ordinary buy-the-product-get-an-entry promotion. But the further a promotion leans towards pure Gambler appeal, low odds, high value, thin connection to a purchase, the closer it sits to a line regulators are actively redrawing. A pool that is mostly a large tier of achievable, purchase-linked rewards with a few aspirational prizes on top reads unambiguously as a trade promotion. A pool that is one enormous low-odds prize is starting to look like the thing the bill is trying to separate out. Worth knowing at the design stage rather than at legal review.

## What the public numbers say

We hold far more detailed numbers about prize draws and cashbacks than appear here, entries and claims from promotions we have run and fulfilled, and none of them is in this book. They are our clients’ promotions and our clients’ customers. What can be said in public comes from the promotions themselves and from the people who count them.

Promo-Monitor, an independent tracker of Australian promotions, counted liquor store promotions from 2022 to 2025, and its figures put both pilots on the same chart. In 2025, 65.2 per cent of the promotions it found were a chance to win, built for the Gambler. About a quarter offered a certain or immediate reward, built for the Accountant. And the share that did both in one promotion, an instant win with a major draw on top or a gift with purchase plus a chance to win, went from 3.4 per cent in 2022 to 9.4 per cent: the Dopamine Sandwich, nearly tripling in three years. The twelve suppliers the report treats as leaders had all used that combined design at least once; among the other 105 suppliers whose brands were promoted, 12.4 per cent had.

On the size of prize pools the spread is enormous. Of the 2025 promotions that published a pool, the median for an ordinary promotion was $10,000, and for one backed by prize insurance it was about $411,000, a story chapter 7 picks up. All of these are counts of promotions, not results. They say what brands chose, not what worked, and the report says as much about its own figures. They do settle one thing: in liquor the Gambler gets most of the attention, and the design that speaks to both pilots at once is growing from a small base.

Arguing that the pool is weak is only half an argument. In our experience the stronger levers are being in front of more shoppers, for the right length of time, and making the odds believable, rather than paying people more. That is experience, not a published finding, and it leans towards liquor and whitegoods, the categories we work in most.

## Deciding which pilot you are flying for

None of this replaces the sum from chapter 1. The three-second equation still decides whether the offer is worth the shopper’s attention at all, and the Insult Threshold still applies if the certain prize in the Accountant’s tier is too small to be worth claiming. What the two pilots add is an earlier and cheaper question, one that should be asked before anyone argues about prize values: which pilot is this promotion actually flying for, and is it the same pilot the last three flew for? A brand that has run five instant wins in a row has been talking to the Gambler for a year and has not said a word to the Accountant. That is not a mechanic problem. It is a strategy gap, and it usually belongs to the brand that never asks whether the last promotion worked or just felt exciting to launch.

The implication for the brief is uncomfortable and useful. If the pool were halved and the difference spent on being in more doors, letting people come back, and making the odds believable, would more bottles leave the shelf or fewer? In our experience, more shoppers would act, and in a promotion that needs a purchase to enter, more shoppers acting is more sales. Whether those sales are extra, rather than ones that would have happened anyway, is the client’s sell-out data to answer, and it is worth asking for before the next pool is set. The question is almost never asked, because the prize pool is the easiest part of a promotion to argue about, and nobody has ever been blamed for a prize that was too big.

Which brings us to the term in the sum that everyone wants to shrink and nobody wants to understand. The next chapter is about friction, and about the day we discovered it was the thing paying for the generosity.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**What are the Gambler and the Accountant in promotional marketing?** The two pilots in the shopper's head, from The Shelf by Mark Alexander of Bamboo Marketing. The Gambler wants a chance at something disproportionate and responds to draws and instant wins. The Accountant wants a known return for a known action and responds to cashbacks, gifts with purchase and bundles.

**What is the Dopamine Sandwich?** A prize structure that pairs one or two large, low-probability prizes for the Gambler with a much larger tier of small, high-probability prizes for the Accountant, inside one mechanic with one entry and one job.

**Is the Dopamine Sandwich becoming more common?** In Australian liquor, yes. Promo-Monitor found promotions combining an instant result with a major draw grew from 3.4 per cent of liquor store promotions in 2022 to 9.4 per cent in 2025. All twelve suppliers it treats as leaders had used the design; 12.4 per cent of the other 105 had. Counts of promotions, not results.

**Does a bigger prize pool get more entries?** Rarely in proportion to cost. Being in front of more shoppers, for the right length of time, and making the odds believable usually matter more. The median published pool for an ordinary 2025 liquor promotion was $10,000 (Promo-Monitor).

**Does the Gambling Reform Bill affect ordinary trade promotions?** It targets promotions where customers pay a membership or subscription fee mainly to access recurring draws. Ordinary buy-the-product-get-an-entry promotions are not the target, but pools leaning heavily on one low-odds prize with a thin purchase link sit closer to the line. Not legal advice.


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# Chapter 4: Friction Funds Generosity
_How to fund a bigger promotion: claim gates, slippage and promotion insurance_

## A phone in one hand

In February 2007, Virgin Mobile wanted to give new customers a reason to choose them that actually felt like Virgin: generous, a little cheeky, impossible to mistake for a phone company being sensible. The ordinary options were all on the table, and they were all fine. A gift card. A cashback. A pair of movie tickets and a thank-you text. Fine was the problem. Shoppers had seen every one of them, priced them at face value, and quietly folded them into the deal before the deal was even on the table.

The answer was not in the phone business at all. It was in the family. Virgin flew planes.

So from 11 February to 31 March 2007, a customer who took a handset on a Phone On Us plan, online or over the phone, could claim a return flight on Virgin Blue. Free, taxes included, worth up to five hundred dollars. Not points, not a partner discount, not a voucher toward something: a seat on the family airline. A phone in one Virgin hand and a boarding pass in the other, and for seven weeks the two brands did not so much cross-promote as simply agree to be one brand. The offer felt inevitable the moment it was said out loud, which is what the best brand promotions feel like, and almost none of the ordinary ones do.

A five-hundred-dollar promise on a phone plan is not a promotion so much as a dare, and this chapter is about the machinery that makes a dare like that safe to sign.

Here is the path a customer walked. Activate the phone. Within five working days, an SMS arrives carrying a unique code. Register the code and submit the claim form online within 21 days. A booking form arrives in the post; fill it in with three travel preferences, each at least sixty days in the future, and post it back within sixty days of activation. Then the flight is booked against those preferences, subject to promotional seat availability. Travel within twelve months, on the listed direct routes, outside school holidays, public holidays and special events.

Read cold, that is a lot of steps. Read as engineering, every one of them is doing a paid job. The claim clocks sort the people who want to fly from the people who merely liked the word free, and they do the sorting early, in minutes at a keyboard, not months later at an airport. The advance-booking rule and the blackout dates are what let an airline release seats it could actually spare, which is the entire reason a five hundred dollar ticket could ride on a mobile phone plan. The three preferences trade certainty for availability, and say so in plain sight.

And none of it was hidden. The terms opened with a box titled IMPORTANT POINTS, and the first things in it were the catches: selected routes, promotional availability, no school holidays, sixty days to claim. The conditions were not the fine print of the offer. They were the offer, stated before the dream was. People will accept work in exchange for something they actually want. What they will not accept is discovering the work after they thought the wanting was over.

Virgin got a headline no gift card will ever buy, and a customer who never got around to claiming lost nothing: they got the phone plan they signed up for and an offer they chose not to use. The whole thing ran on the fuel with the worst reputation in marketing: friction.

## The expectation problem

Here is the shift the industry has been slow to price in: the standard rewards have stopped persuading. Cashbacks and gift cards used to be a reason to choose. After years of saturation, shoppers treat them as part of the price rather than on top of it, and an expected reward changes nothing at the shelf, because the shopper had already counted it before they arrived.

The way out is concentration, not addition. Spread thin, the money buys wallpaper: a small predictable reward on everything, noticed by no one. Concentrated, the same money funds an offer people tell other people about. Nobody has ever told a friend about a gift card. Free flights got talked about.

The tool that makes concentration possible is friction. That is an uncomfortable thing to say out loud, so it is worth being precise about what friction actually does.

## The paradox, named

Ask a room of marketers about friction and you will hear the instinct we all started with: less friction, more entries, better campaign. That is half the story, and for a Breaker (chapter 2) it is the right half. The other half we learned by watching offers succeed because of their hurdles, not despite them.

Friction does three jobs at once. It protects the budget: a claim that takes some effort filters out the people who are gaming the offer rather than buying the product. It raises the value of the reward: a prize that took a little work feels earned rather than gimmicky, and the behavioural research on effort has been saying so for decades. And, the job the industry discusses least, it concentrates the spend. Every point of friction lowers redemption. Every point of redemption you do not pay for is budget you can move into the reward itself.

That is the whole trick of the free flights. The gates funded the generosity. Without them, the same money would have bought a nice gift card. So the sentence we ended up using in the office, and eventually in pitch rooms, is that friction is how you fund generosity, and the craft is in where you put it.

## Promotion insurance: the person who buys the risk

Gates do a second job that no customer ever sees, and it is the part of this chapter that changes how you design offers. A promotional liability can be insured. Before an offer opens, the cost of every reward that will ever be claimed can be placed with specialists whose trade is pricing promotional risk, for a fee agreed in advance. From that moment, if every single customer claims, the claims are the insurer’s problem. The brand has bought certainty, and somebody else has sold it, at a price they set themselves. That price is not a margin anyone hopes for. It is calculated from how the gates are expected to behave.

Sit with what that means. An underwriter cannot price a promise that says anyone might fly anywhere, any time. An underwriter can price claim windows, blackout periods, listed routes and limited seat availability, because each of those turns open-ended goodwill into an event with a probability. Friction architecture does not only shape shopper behaviour. It is what makes a liability priceable at all. A gate you can model is a gate somebody will insure, and a promise somebody will insure is a promise a client will sign. That is the machinery that turns an impossible headline into a purchase order.

It also settles who carries what. In an insured build, the customer carries some effort, disclosed up front, and is repaid with a reward worth having. The brand carries a fixed cost and no risk. The insurer carries the redemption curve, at a price it sets itself. Nobody in the chain is exposed to a surprise, which is precisely what Hoover forgot to arrange.

## Slippage: designing the fall-away

The industry has a word for the people who never claim: slippage. It gets said quietly, as if the business model were a secret. It should not be. Every insurance policy, every airline seat sold as a sale fare, every gym membership is priced on the gap between the people who could use a thing and the people who do. A promotion is no different. There are two honest tests for whether yours is designed or merely hoped for.

The first test is whether everyone at the table knows how the offer makes its money. In an insured build the answer is structural: the liability is priced and sold before launch, so nobody in the room needs the shoppers to disappoint. The generosity is real precisely because somebody has done cold arithmetic on it. An offer that only works while the client believes redemption will run higher than the model says is not slippage. It is a lie with a spreadsheet.

The second test is where the fall-away happens. A well-set gate stops people early and cheaply: before they have spent an evening, before they have paid anything, before they have told their kids. That is what the claim clocks in the flights offer were for; a customer who was never going to fly found out at step three of six, at no cost, with their phone plan unaffected. A badly set gate does the opposite. It lets people carry hope, effort and sometimes money deep into the process, then drops them at the end, where it hurts the most and photographs the worst.

And a good gate has a ladder back. An invalid claim should not simply die: the claimant should be told what is wrong and given a date to fix it by, and reminded before that date. A gate you can appeal is friction. A gate you silently fall off is a trap, and the difference is the complaint file.

The reference case for the badly set gate is the cautionary tale everyone in the trade knows, and it used our headline. In 1992 Hoover offered free flights in the UK with a modest purchase, priced the offer on the assumption that hardly anyone would claim, and then met a public that claimed anyway. The company spent years fighting its own customers, and the episode now teaches itself in business schools. The lesson is not that free flights are dangerous. The same headline ran in Australia in 2007, with every gate stated before the dream. The lesson is who the maths is designed to survive. Hoover carried its own liability, unpriced, and engineered for the customers not turning up. The Virgin offer was engineered, gate by gate and in plain sight, for the day they did.

## What a prize buys

The size of the reward sets how much work you are allowed to ask for. People will fill in two forms and wait for a phone call for a five hundred dollar flight. They will not upload a receipt for a stubby holder, and the entry numbers will tell you so with great honesty.

Years ago we noticed, in those entry numbers, the point where a reward stops being worth its own claim process. We started calling it the Insult Threshold, and it explains more dead cashbacks than any creative failure ever has. A small reward behind a heavy process does not read as value. It reads as admin, and shoppers answer admin with silence.

So the sweet spot moves with the prize. A big reward can carry high gates. A nervous budget needs them. A category already running hot with frustration needs the gates lowered before it needs anything else. In earlier versions of this thinking we sketched the trade-off as a table with illustrative percentages, and we have retired it. Real redemption rates exist, but they belong to the brands whose promotions produced them, and an invented table is worse than none. The shape is not in dispute: the more work you ask for, the fewer people finish, and the bigger the prize, the more work they will do.

## The audit

Where friction actually gets set, most weeks, is not a strategy meeting. It is a form. Somebody adds a field because the brand team would love the data, somebody else adds a checkbox because legal suggested it, and by launch day the claim process has quietly become the real offer.

### Tuning Note

For every field you ask a claimant to complete, ask three questions. Does it protect the budget? Does it raise the perceived value? Or does it just annoy people? Date of birth for a five-dollar voucher fails all three, and creates privacy obligations you do not want (chapter 16). The flights form asked for date of birth and passed the test: age was an eligibility condition. The question is never how many fields. It is whether each one has a job.

Treat every field as if it costs entries, because it does. The argument is only ever about how many, and that argument should be settled with your own completion data, not in the meeting.

## The rest of the toolkit

Friction is one way to concentrate a budget. It has three siblings, and the best campaigns tend to use them together.

Cashback arbitrage. A cashback lands like a discount at the shelf without touching the shelf price, and you fund the claims, not the volume. The Insult Threshold cuts both ways here: a cashback so small or so fiddly that claiming feels like being played is not a saving, it is an offer nobody believed.

The self-liquidating premium. The customer pays for the prize. Buy the packs, add fifteen dollars, take the cooler bag worth fifty at retail. Sourced properly, the promotion costs close to nothing, the shopper still wins the trade, and the brand gets volume without touching the marketing budget.

The insured promotion. You want a headline your budget cannot survive, and there is an industry that exists to sell you the gap: the liability, priced and sold before launch for a fixed fee. Prize indemnity on a million-dollar draw is the most familiar version. It gets a fuller treatment where it belongs, in chapter 7.

The conditional offer. The reward triggers only if something external happens: the team wins, the temperature hits forty, the first hundred today. Engineered with caps and cover, it turns a transaction into a story people follow. The Headliners chapter takes it further, along with the other thing the flights had going for them: a partner whose brand made the offer feel inevitable rather than bolted on.

What the four share is that none of them spends less. They spend the same money in a shape the shopper actually feels.

## Where this leaves the brief

Back to the free flights, because every chapter in this book ends up back at a brief. A bigger budget would not have produced that offer. What the brief needed was an idea that belonged to the brand, somewhere to put the friction, the nerve to price the fall-away in the open, and a reward at the end big enough to justify the walk. Friction is one lever of five, and when the full board arrives in chapter 6 it will be sitting in the middle of it: the most misunderstood lever, and the one that pays for the others. Chapter 7 is what happens when a client asks for something impossible and you pull all five at once.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**How can friction help a promotion?** A well-placed claim step filters out people gaming the offer, makes the reward feel earned, and lowers redemption, which frees budget to make the reward itself bigger. From The Shelf by Mark Alexander of Bamboo Marketing.

**What is slippage in a promotion?** The share of people who could claim a reward but do not. It is honest when the offer is priced to survive full redemption and every condition is stated up front; it is not honest when the offer only works if shoppers give up.

**What is promotion insurance?** Cover bought before launch that transfers the cost of claims or a large prize to a specialist for a fee agreed in advance. An insurer can price claim windows, blackout dates and capped availability because each turns an open promise into an event with a probability.

**What went wrong with the Hoover free flights promotion?** In 1992 Hoover offered free flights in the UK with a modest purchase, assumed few would claim, carried the liability itself and met a public that claimed anyway. The lesson is to design the maths for the day customers do turn up.

**How many fields should a claim form have?** As few as do a job. For each field ask: does it protect the budget, raise the perceived value, or just annoy people? Date of birth for a five-dollar voucher fails all three.


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# Chapter 5: The Creative and the Engine
_How to plan a promotional campaign that keeps its promise_

## A chocolate bar that read the internet

In late May 2016, Snickers in Australia started reading the internet. An algorithm built by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne for Mars went through around fourteen thousand social posts a day, looking for anger with a lexicon of some three thousand words that was meant to understand slang and sarcasm. The angrier the internet got, the cheaper a Snickers became at 7-Eleven. The price changed more than a hundred and forty times a day, and on the worst days it fell as far as 82 per cent below the normal shelf price. You went to the Snickers website, pressed a button, got a barcode on your phone and showed it at any of 7-Eleven’s stores. No app, no voucher to print. The campaign ran until the end of June, and it was called the Hungerithm.

It is worth pausing on what kind of thing that was, because it does not fit neatly into either of the two rooms most promotions are built in. It was not a creative idea that somebody then attached a mechanic to. It was not a mechanic that somebody then dressed in a campaign. The price engine was the advertisement. The brand line, you are not you when you are hungry, had been running for years; here it became a piece of software that turned the national mood into a shelf price, live, and the only way to see the idea was to watch the engine work.

The agency’s own case study reports that Snickers sales rose 67 per cent and Snickers sales at 7-Eleven grew a little over 19 per cent. It does not say who measured either figure, so we give them as the agency gives them and lean on them no harder than that. What nobody disputes is that it was talked about, which is the job it was built for: a Headliner, in the language of chapter 2, whose engine was the joke.

Most promotions are not built like that. Most are built by two sets of people who rarely sit in the same meeting, and this chapter is about what happens in the gap between them.

## Two layers, two rooms: the creative idea and the mechanic

Every promotion has two layers. The creative layer is everything the shopper sees and remembers: the idea, the line, the look, the shelf impact, the reason it feels like this brand and nobody else. The engine layer is everything that makes the promise true: the offer design, the odds, the caps, the gates, the claim form, the validation, the fraud checks, the payment, the phone call to the winner. The creative layer is the part that wins awards. The engine layer is the part that decides whether the shopper who believed the creative is glad they did.

In most organisations the two layers are briefed separately. The creative agency gets the brand brief and the campaign idea; the promotions team, or the platform, or somebody in operations, gets a mechanic and a budget and is asked to make it work. The first time the two meet is often a work-in-progress meeting a few weeks out, where somebody discovers that the hero line promises something the terms do not, or that the claim process needs a field the creative never mentioned, or that the prize everyone loves cannot be fulfilled in the timeframe on the poster.

We have sat on both sides of that meeting for a long time, and we have come to a simple position. The best promotions we know were not great creative with a sensible mechanic attached. They were a great mechanic, designed first and designed well, and then brought to life by creative that understood exactly what the mechanic was doing. The free flights in chapter 4 were a creative idea that only existed because the engine made it priceable. The Hungerithm was an engine that only existed because the creative needed it. In both, you cannot find the seam.

Our dancing bottle in chapter 1 is the other kind. The creative layer was beautiful and the engine was an afterthought: there was nothing to win, nothing to make the download worth it, and no reason for anyone at a bottle shop on a Friday to do the work. A creative layer cannot carry an engine that is not there, and if the economics do not work, no artwork will save them.

## When the engine fails in public

The engine is mostly invisible when it works, which is why it tends to be the last thing designed and the first thing cut. It becomes very visible when it fails, and it almost always fails at the moment the shopper is holding the promise in their hand.

In 1990 Coca-Cola built cans that sprang open to reveal cash inside. To make the winning cans feel like real ones, they were weighted with water. Some of the mechanisms failed, at least one person drank the water, and what had been the company’s flagship promotion that year was pulled within weeks. The idea was magic. The failure was in the single moment the shopper actually touched it.

In 2009 KFC put a coupon for a free grilled chicken meal online, and Oprah Winfrey talked about it on her show. Millions of coupons were downloaded, stores were overwhelmed, franchisees ran out of chicken, and KFC stopped honouring its own coupon partway through, handing out rain checks and an apology instead. The creative and the media had worked beyond anyone’s plan. The engine had no cap, no stock model and no way of slowing down, and so the promotion was killed by its own success.

And chapter 3 has already met the darkest one: McDonald’s Monopoly in the United States, where the person trusted with the winning pieces was quietly selling them for twelve years. Shoppers never noticed, because the creative layer kept working perfectly. Nobody can feel the difference between long odds and none.

Each of those failures is a lever from chapter 6 that the engine was supposed to hold. The MagiCan was Belief and Friction at the point of contact. KFC was Liability, an open promise with nothing between it and the queue. Monopoly was Belief at its most basic: whether the prize could be won at all. The engine is where the faders are physically held in place. When it slips, they move on their own.

## How to write a promotion headline: the message hierarchy

Between the creative and the engine sits a thin layer that both sides tend to think the other owns, which is the words. You can have the right mechanic, the right odds and a sound budget, and still lose the shopper because they cannot tell what they would get in the three seconds they give you.

In the aisle the shopper reads a promotion in a fairly fixed order, and it is not the order the creative is usually laid out in. First, a trigger word: win, instant, free, guaranteed. Then the prize: what do I get? Then the quantity, because one prize and a thousand prizes are completely different offers. Then the odds or the value. Then the cost of taking part: just scan, or buy three? After that they have either committed or moved on, and the campaign narrative, the brand story and the legals have not been read by anyone deciding anything.

Our own working version is shorter, and we put it on every asset we brief: the reward, the action and the deadline, in that order. What do I get, what do I do, by when. A good headline answers the first of those in two or three words. Win $10 instantly is a promotion. Participate in our exciting summer promotion for a chance to experience paradise is a paragraph, and each of its words is working against it: participate sounds like effort, chance sounds like unlikely, and experience sounds like nobody is sure what the prize is.

Getting the hierarchy right pays for itself in places nobody budgets for. Designers know what to make big. Shoppers will tolerate more friction when the value is plain. The category manager sees an offer that will sit cleanly in a catalogue. And legal review goes faster, because an offer that is clear and prominent is most of the way to being compliant. The hierarchy is not a style preference. It is where the creative layer agrees, out loud, to tell the truth about the engine.

## After the till

Here is the part of a promotion almost no creative brief mentions: what happens to the shopper after they have bought. For a prize draw it is a form and then, for nearly everyone, silence. For a cashback or a gift with purchase it is a claim: a receipt photographed, a serial number found, a form filled in, a wait, a payment. That is a second shopper experience, often weeks long, and it is where the brand either keeps its promise or quietly breaks it.

Most of what we know about this we know from running it. A claim fails for dull reasons: the receipt photo is too dark, the model number is in the wrong place, the form asks for something the shopper does not have to hand. Every one of those is a person who did what the poster asked and still did not get what it promised, and none of them shows up in the creative’s awards entry. The engine’s job is to make the necessary checks feel proportionate, to tell people clearly what went wrong and give them a way back, and to pay quickly, because nothing turns a happy claimant into a complaint faster than a long wait for money they have already been promised.

It is also where the long promises live. Some gift-with-purchase programs never really close: the offer sits on the shelf for years, and every week a few more receipts arrive to be read, serial numbers checked and gifts sent. The creative made people want the gift. The engine is the reason an offer can stay open that long without anyone having to think about it, and it is the reason a client can say yes to a promise with no end date.

## [STORY NEEDED: why we built our own engine]

This is the place for the story of Trevor itself: what we saw going wrong, or not well enough, when the engine sat with a third party, and what made us decide to build our own platform rather than keep briefing someone else’s. Needed from Mark: the moment or the campaign that tipped it, roughly when, and one thing Trevor now does that we could not do before. No third party named (ruling R7). One or two paragraphs is enough; it is the book’s most honest explanation of why the agency and the platform are the same business. Client stories only from public facts, or with the client’s written permission; no client data (ruling R15).

## Same room, same day

So the rule we work to is unglamorous. The creative and the engine are decided in the same room, on the same day, by people who can both read a terms and conditions document and a mood board. The job comes first, as chapter 2 asks. Then the levers, as chapter 6 sets out. Then the mechanic that holds them in place. And then the creative, whose task is not to decorate the mechanic but to make the shopper understand it in three seconds and want it in four.

When that happens, the seam disappears, and you get promotions where you cannot tell where the idea ends and the machinery begins. A phone plan that comes with a flight on the sister airline. A chocolate bar that gets cheaper when the internet gets angry. Those are not creative ideas with good operations behind them. They are the same idea, built once, by people who understood that the engine is where the promise is kept.

The next chapter takes the five levers that engine has to hold, one at a time, starting with a game that improved four of them and then did not come back.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**- What was the Snickers Hungerithm?** - What is the difference between the creative and the engine in a promotion?

**- Why do promotions fail at the moment the shopper touches them?** - What order do shoppers read a promotion in? (the message hierarchy; reward, action, deadline)

**- What happens to the shopper after they buy?** Links down (Trevor): How Cashback Promotions Work in Australia: Claims, Validation, and Payout; Promotional Fulfilment in Australia: How It Works; Promotion Fraud in 2026; Real-Time Promotion Analytics; Who Handles Cashback Promotion Redemption. Links across (Bamboo): Campaign Creative and Intelligence hub; How to Write a Shopper Marketing Brief (add reward-action-deadline there); chapters 1, 2, 4, 6.

**What is the message hierarchy in promotional marketing?** The order a shopper reads a promotion in the few seconds it gets: a trigger word (win, instant, free), the prize, how many prizes, the odds or value, then the cost of taking part. Bamboo Marketing’s working version, from The Shelf, is the reward, the action and the deadline, in that order, on every asset.

**What is the difference between creative and mechanics in a promotion?** The creative layer is what the shopper sees and remembers: the idea, the line, the look. The engine layer is what makes the promise true: the offer design, odds, caps, claim, validation, fraud checks and payment. The best promotions design the mechanic first and build the creative to make it understood.

**What was the Snickers Hungerithm?** A 2016 Australian promotion by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne for Mars in which an algorithm read around 14,000 social posts a day and cut the price of a Snickers at 7-Eleven as online anger rose, by as much as 82 per cent, with prices changing more than 140 times a day.


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# 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.

|                |                                                                                     |                                                                            |
|----------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|                | **2024**                                                                            | **2025**                                                                   |
| Dates          | 4 September to 22 October                                                           | 3 September to 14 October                                                  |
| Prizes         | 60 million                                                                          | 49 million                                                                 |
| Prize pool     | \$753 million                                                                       | \$718 million                                                              |
| Stated odds    | 1 in 4                                                                              | 1 in 3                                                                     |
| How you played | Tickets on packaging plus the app in most states; app-only trial in WA and Tasmania | Only in the MyMacca’s app, nationally                                      |
| Headline prize | Three Isuzu vehicles, each over \$70,000                                            | A year of mortgage or rent paid, plus \$25,000 of Uber rides and Uber Eats |

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.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**What are the Five Levers in promotional marketing?** Reward, Belief, Friction, Liability and Venue: the five settings every promotion is built on, from The Shelf by Mark Alexander of Bamboo Marketing. The mechanic is the gearbox that holds them in place.

**What is the Venue lever?** Where the promotion is physically met, on pack, at the shelf, at the counter or in an app, and who must agree for it to be met there. In Australian liquor, retailers ran 222 of 646 promotions in 2025, up from 94 in 2022 (Promo-Monitor).

**Which prizes are Australian liquor promotions moving toward?** Away from branded rewards (33.6 per cent of promotions in 2022, 25.1 per cent in 2025) and toward travel and experiences (17.4 to 27.4 per cent) and gift cards (20.3 to 26.2 per cent), per Promo-Monitor. Counts of promotions, not results.

**Why did McDonald's pause Monopoly in Australia in 2026?** McDonald's has not given a reason. Bamboo Marketing's reading is that the 2025 app-only game improved prizes and odds but removed the physical peel that made Monopoly a public event.

**How do you diagnose a promotion with the Five Levers?** Put the idea on the board, find the lever most out of tune, and name the move that brings it back. Every out-of-tune lever gets a move, never a verdict.


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# Chapter 7: The Impossible Brief
_Promotional strategies for the brief that cannot be done_

## A car you could give back

At the start of 2009 the American car market was not in a slump. It was in a hole. People were losing their jobs by the hundreds of thousands a month, and the ones who still had jobs were watching the news and deciding that this was not the year for a car loan. Every carmaker had the same brief: sell cars to people who are frightened. Every carmaker had the same answer, which was money. Bigger rebates, cheaper finance, longer terms.

Money was the wrong answer, and it is worth being exact about why. Nobody was standing in a showroom thinking the car was two thousand dollars too dear. They were thinking: what happens to me, and to this loan, if I am the next one let go? A rebate makes the car cheaper. It does nothing about the fear. You can push the reward fader all the way to the top and the shopper is still not in the car, because the thing between them and the car is not price.

Hyundai did something else. In January 2009 it launched Hyundai Assurance: buy or lease a new Hyundai, and if you lose your job within a year, give it back. Hyundai would cover the gap between what you owed and what the car was worth, up to $7,500. A few weeks later it went further and offered to make up to three months of your payments while you looked for work, before you had to hand anything back.

That January, Hyundai sold 24,512 vehicles in the United States, up 14 per cent on the January before. The market as a whole fell 37 per cent. Not all of that was the promise. Hyundai sold small, sensible, cheap cars, which were exactly what a frightened country wanted, and it would be a stretch to hand the whole result to one offer. But a carmaker growing in a month when the market fell by more than a third does not happen by accident, and the marketing professors who wrote about it at the time read it the same way. The offer had answered the question the shopper was actually asking.

Look at what Hyundai did not do. It did not find a bigger reward. It did not make the claim easier or find a better venue. It changed the promise. The brief everyone else had was “make the car more attractive”, and that brief was impossible, because attraction was not the problem. Hyundai rewrote it as “make the purchase safe”, and that brief could be done. As far as reports go, a few hundred cars came back. The rest of the buyers simply drove away with a car and a little less fear.

That is what this chapter is about. Every so often a client puts something on the table that cannot be done with any setting of the five faders. A headline the budget cannot survive. A reward nobody will believe. A retailer who will not say yes. The ordinary response is to say no, or to say yes and quietly deliver something smaller. The dark art is the third answer: change what the desk is plugged into.

## What makes a brief impossible

In our experience, briefs are almost never impossible in the way they first look. They are impossible in one specific place, and the useful work is finding which place. Put the brief on the board from chapter 6 and one fader will be past its stop.

Sometimes it is Reward. The client wants a prize that would move the category, and the budget would buy a tenth of it. Sometimes it is Belief: the prize is big enough, but the odds are so long that nobody in the aisle will believe they could win it, so the big number does no work. Sometimes it is Friction, when the only way to prove a purchase is a process no tired parent will finish. Sometimes it is Liability, when the client loves an open-ended offer and the finance director has done the sum on what happens if it runs hot. And sometimes it is Venue: the idea is good and the retailer will not have it in the store.

Naming the fader changes the conversation in the room. “We can’t afford that” becomes “Reward is past its stop, so who else could pay for the reward?” “Finance will never sign this” becomes “Liability is past its stop, so who could carry it?” Each of those is a question with answers, and the answers are the moves the rest of this chapter is about. None of them is clever for its own sake. Each one moves the impossible part of the brief somewhere it can be done.

## Prize indemnity insurance: selling the risk

In April 2007, Jordan’s Furniture, a New England furniture chain, made its customers an offer that sounded like a stunt. Buy furniture during the promotion, and if the Boston Red Sox won the World Series that October, you got your money back. All of it.

The Red Sox won. They swept the Colorado Rockies four games to none, and nearly thirty thousand Jordan’s customers got their furniture free.

Jordan’s did not go broke, because Jordan’s had never been holding the bet. Before the offer opened, the risk had been sold to an insurer: a specialist that looked at the Red Sox’s chances, the likely sales in the window and the size of the refunds, and named a price for carrying the lot. Jordan’s paid that price, a known number, and in exchange swapped a liability it could not survive for a cost it could budget. When the Red Sox won, the refunds were the insurer’s problem. The customers had the best story in Boston, and Jordan’s had paid a premium it had known about since before the first sofa sold.

Nineteen years later, Jordan’s ran the same play. Buy furniture or a mattress between 20 January and 1 March 2026, and if both of the University of Connecticut’s basketball teams, the men’s and the women’s, reached their national championship games, the purchase was free. USA Today put the possible refunds at around fifty million dollars. Jordan’s former chief executive said publicly that the promotion was insured. The women’s team lost its semi-final, the condition failed, and nobody got a refund. The policy paid nothing, which is exactly what a policy is for. Jordan’s bought the ability to make a fifty-million-dollar promise for the price of a premium, and the promise did its job whether or not it came true.

This is prize indemnity insurance, or promotional risk cover, and in Australia it is the quiet engine behind the biggest numbers you see on pack: the million-dollar instant win, the hole in one at the charity day, the “if it rains on the day, your money back”. Chapter 4 met the principle: a gate you can model is a gate somebody will insure. The machinery is the same in each case. An insurer can price anything with a probability. Your job is to design the promise so it has one.

There is one Australian aisle where somebody has counted. Promo-Monitor, an independent tracker of Australian promotions, logged every liquor store promotion it could find from 2022 to 2025. In 2025, 73 of the 646 it found were insured, about one in nine, up from 60 in 2022. They are where the big numbers live. Of the 2025 promotions that published a prize pool, the insured ones had a median pool of about $411,000; the rest had a median of $10,000. Three in four insured pools were over $100,000, against three in a hundred of the others. The report adds the caution we would add ourselves, and it is worth keeping in mind for the rest of this chapter: those figures link insurance to the size of the promise, not to whether the promotion sold anything.

Three things follow, and they are the part clients get wrong. First, the insurer prices the odds, so the odds have to be real and fixed before launch: a sealed draw, a set number of winning pieces, a named sporting result. A promise whose odds you can change halfway through is not insurable, and a promise that is not insurable is a promise your finance director will not sign. Second, the cover is for the promise as written. Change the headline, the dates or the condition after the policy is bound and you may have changed the risk without changing the policy. Third, the premium is not a small number when the odds are short. Insurance makes a long shot affordable. It does not make a likely event cheap. If the brief is “a hundred people will definitely win a car”, you are not buying insurance, you are buying a hundred cars.

Insurance moves the Liability fader, and only that one. It does nothing about Belief. A million-dollar prize that nobody in the aisle thinks they could win is still a million-dollar prize doing no work, however safely it is covered. The best insured promotions pair the big covered number with a reward that is certain and small, the Dopamine Sandwich from chapter 3, so the Gambler has something to dream about and the Accountant has something to collect. That is the shape the Australian liquor aisle has been moving toward. In the same count, the family of instant wins sold as odds, the 1 in 3s and 1 in 7s, grew from 5.4 to 8.4 per cent of all promotions between 2022 and 2025, while the other insured types stayed flat or fell. One in seven is as close to certain as a chance gets, which is what the Accountant wants, and the insurer is what makes it affordable at that volume.

## The prize nobody meant to give

Now the cautionary tale, because a chapter about impossible promises has to have one.

In 1996 Pepsi ran a promotion called Pepsi Stuff. Drink Pepsi, collect points from the packs, swap the points for gear: a T-shirt for 75 points, a leather jacket for 1,450. The television ad ended, as a joke, with a teenager landing a Harrier jump jet outside his school. On screen: HARRIER FIGHTER 7,000,000 PEPSI POINTS.

Seven million points was meant to be absurd. The trouble was in the catalogue. The rules let you buy extra points for ten cents each once you had fifteen from packs. A business student named John Leonard did the sum, raised the money from investors, and in 1996 sent Pepsi fifteen labels and a cheque for $700,008.50. Pepsi sent the cheque back. Leonard sued.

Pepsi won. In August 1999 a federal court in New York ruled that the ad was not an offer, and that no reasonable person could have thought a soft drink company was really giving away a military jet. The appeal court agreed in 2000. Pepsi kept running the ad, with the jet now priced at 700,000,000 points and the words “just kidding” added.

It is a funny story, and Pepsi was right in law. But it took the best part of four years and a federal judge to say so, and the story is still told, a quarter of a century later, as the time Pepsi would not hand over the jet. Here is the lesson we take from it. Every number in a promotion is a promise until the terms say otherwise, and the shopper reads the number before the terms. In Australian consumer law the test is what the offer would lead an ordinary shopper to believe, and we would not want to rely on a joke as a defence. So the rule in our office is short. Never put a number in a promotion you would not be prepared to pay, or to insure. If it is a joke, make sure the joke cannot be bought.

## Five promotional strategies for an impossible brief

Over enough years the moves sort themselves into five. They are not a checklist, and most good answers use two of them at once. What they share is that none of them pushes a fader harder. Each one moves the problem.

Sell the risk. When Liability is past its stop, find someone whose trade is carrying it. Prize indemnity, a fixed fee per redemption, a capped fulfilment contract: each turns an open promise into a known cost. The condition is that the promise has odds an outsider can price, so this move usually comes with a redesign of the gates. Jordan’s is this move at its boldest.

Borrow the reward. When Reward is past its stop, ask who else wants to be in front of this shopper. An airline with empty seats on a Tuesday, a resort out of its busy weeks, a streaming service that wants trials: each has a reward that costs them far less than it is worth to the shopper, and a reason to give it. The partner’s spare capacity becomes your prize. This is also how a modest brand ends up with a headline that looks expensive.

Make it conditional. When the client wants a huge reward and can afford a small one, tie the huge one to something outside anyone’s control: a team winning, a temperature, a date. The shopper prices the hope; the insurer prices the odds. Done well, it turns a purchase into a story people follow for weeks, which is why this move belongs as much to the Headliners as to the Loaders. Done badly, it is a lottery with a furniture shop attached.

Cap it in time or in number. When an open offer frightens finance, close it: the first five hundred, the first fortnight, one a day for thirty days. A cap turns an unknown liability into a known one and adds a reason to act now. The cost is belief, if the cap is so tight that the shopper assumes it is already gone, so say how many are left wherever you can.

Change the promise. The biggest move, and the rarest. When no setting of the faders works, ask what the shopper is actually afraid of, or actually wants, and promise that instead. Hyundai stopped selling a cheaper car and started selling a safe purchase. A money-back guarantee, a try-before-you-commit, a promise about what happens if things go wrong: none of these is a prize, and all of them are promotions. They work on the Belief fader from the other side, by removing the reason not to believe.

## Where this leaves the brief

Every chapter of this book ends up back at a brief, and this one ends at the hardest kind: the one the client half expects you to turn down. The temptation in that room is to be the sensible adult. To say the budget will not stretch, the retailer will not wear it, finance will not sign. Sometimes that is the right answer. More often it is the first answer, and the first answer is usually just the place the thinking stopped.

So the question we ask instead is narrower. Which fader is past its stop, and who else could hold it? An insurer can hold liability. A partner can hold reward. Time can hold a budget, and a better promise can hold belief. Almost every good idea has a version that works, and in an impossible brief the version is usually found by moving the problem to someone, or something, built to carry it.

That is the end of the first part of the book: the three seconds, the one job, the two pilots, the friction, the engine, the five faders and the moves for when the faders run out. Part II takes the six jobs one at a time, starting with the hardest thing in marketing, which is getting a stranger to try you.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**What is prize indemnity insurance?** Cover bought before a promotion launches that transfers the cost of a big prize or refund to a specialist insurer for a fixed premium. The odds must be fixed and verifiable. It makes long shots affordable; it does not make likely events cheap.

**How common is prize insurance in Australian promotions?** In liquor, Promo-Monitor counted 73 insured promotions of 646 in 2025, about one in nine. Their median published pool was about $411,000, against $10,000 for the rest. The report links insurance to the size of the promise, not to results.

**What are good promotional strategies when the budget is too small?** Borrow the reward from a partner, make a big reward conditional on an outside event and insure it, or cap the offer in time or number.

**What was Hyundai Assurance?** A 2009 US offer: buy or lease a new Hyundai and, if you lost your job within a year, return it, with negative equity covered up to $7,500. In January 2009 Hyundai's US sales rose 14 per cent while the market fell 37 per cent.

**What is the dark art of sales promotion?** Bamboo Marketing's name for the craft of finding the version of an idea that works. Dark because it is learned, not because anything is hidden: every condition is stated before the shopper is asked to want anything.


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# Chapter 8: Breakers
_Product sampling, free trials and money back guarantees: how to get a stranger to try you_

## Your first spritz on us

Aperol is a bitter orange aperitif, and the first sip surprises people. That is the whole problem of this chapter in one glass. Somebody who has never had one is being asked to spend money on a drink they may not like, in a category where they already have a favourite, with every reason not to bother sitting in the fridge at home.

Aperol’s answer in Australia has been to give the first one away, and it has done it more than once, in two different shapes. From 1 September to 30 November 2022 the brand gave away 100,000 spritzes in bars, clubs and restaurants: order one, keep the receipt, download an app, photograph the receipt, and a digital card worth up to twenty dollars came back. From early November 2024 to early January 2025 it did it again, this time through BWS: register online, receive a unique barcode on your phone, show it at the counter of a participating store, and walk out with a spritz. The first 35,000 valid claims only, while stocks lasted.

Same promise, two very different promotions, and the difference between them is most of what this chapter has to say. In 2022 the stranger paid first and was refunded later, after an app download and a photo of a receipt. In 2024, as far as the published offer shows, the stranger never paid at all. The moment a Breaker exists to remove, the moment a person who has never tried you has to put money down for something they might not like, had been taken out of the transaction entirely. What was left was a minute of admin before the visit, and a drink.

We do not know how either one performed. Aperol has not published it, and the real scoreboard for both lives in the brand owner’s own sales data, where it belongs. What we can say is that the two shapes are two different tools. The 2024 offer takes the stranger’s risk out of the transaction entirely. The 2022 offer is an older trade tool, the one we call Try Me Free, and it has strengths the free version does not. Knowing when to use which is most of the craft of a Breaker.

## Why trial is the hardest job

Chapter 2 called trial the hardest thing in marketing, and it is worth being clear about why before getting to how. The person in the aisle has a favourite for nearly everything they buy, and the favourite has done nothing wrong. Switching asks them to give up something certain for something unknown, to spend real money on a guess, and to risk being disappointed on a Friday night in front of people. None of those is a big risk. All of them are enough.

There is also an uncomfortable piece of research that every Breaker has to answer. In 1994 Andrew Ehrenberg, Kathy Hammond and Gerald Goodhardt studied the sales spikes from price promotions on leading grocery brands and asked a simple question: who were the extra buyers? Almost all of them had bought the brand before. The promotions did not bring in new customers, and when they ended, sales went back to where they had been, with no lasting lift and no change in loyalty.

That paper was about price cuts, not every kind of promotion, and we would not stretch it further than it goes. But the warning carries. A promotion aimed loosely at everyone is collected mostly by the people who already buy you, because they are the ones standing in front of your product. Unless a Breaker is designed for the stranger, the stranger does not turn up and your regulars get a discount. So a Breaker is built backwards from the person who does not buy you yet. Where are they? What stops them? What would make the first one feel safe?

## What a Breaker needs from the board

Put the job on the five faders from chapter 6 and the settings are unusually clear.

Friction is the fader a Breaker lives on, and the question is not how much friction there is in total but where it sits. Friction before the decision kills trial. Friction after the decision, once the stranger has the product in hand, costs far less. The Aperol barcode moved the work to before the visit and took the payment out; the Virgin flights in chapter 4 put every gate after the phone was connected. Both put the effort where it could not stop the first step.

Reward for a Breaker is usually the product itself, or money off the first one. The product is its own best argument, if it is good, and nothing else a promotion can offer says as much about it.

Belief has to be certain. A chance to win a holiday is a fine reason for a regular to buy again, and a weak reason for a stranger to try something new, because the stranger is already taking one gamble on the product and does not want a second one on the prize. In chapter 3’s terms, the Breaker is flown for the Accountant. Promo-Monitor, the independent tracker whose liquor study appears in chapters 6 and 7, puts it in one line in its guide to briefs: “A certain reward moves non-buyers more than a chance to win. Delivery is the main risk.” We agree with both halves.

Venue has to be where the stranger is, which is usually not in front of your bay. Aperol’s 2022 offer met people in bars, where a spritz is ordered by the glass and a nervous first-timer risks one drink, not a bottle. The 2024 offer met them in a bottle shop, with the product handed over at the counter.

Liability is capped, almost always. “The first 35,000” is a Breaker’s natural shape: a known cost, a reason to act now, and an honest limit stated up front.

## Product sampling: give them the thing

Sampling is the oldest Breaker there is: the cube of cheese on a toothpick, the sachet in the magazine, the can handed out at the station. It works for one reason. The stranger’s doubt is about the product, and the only thing that answers a doubt about the product is the product.

It fails for three reasons, and each one has a design answer. The first is that a free sample is taken by whoever is passing, which in a supermarket means plenty of people who already buy you. The answer is to choose where and to whom: outside the category, at the competitor’s moment, through a registration that asks the one question that matters, which is whether they have bought you before. The second is that a sample with nothing attached is a nice moment that ends at the bin. The answer is a reason to buy the second one, a voucher for the full size or a follow-up to the person who registered, which is where a Harvester can ride along with a Breaker without the stranger noticing, exactly as chapter 2 allows. The third is that a sample of a product that does not win is an efficient way of telling a great many people that it does not win.

## Product sampling without giving it away: Try Me Free

There is a version of sampling that hands nothing out at all. Try Me Free asks the shopper to buy the product at full price, in the store, and then claim the purchase price back. Aperol’s 2022 offer was one, with the refund capped. On its face it is a worse deal for the stranger, who still has to put money down first, and in one sense it is. But it does four things a free sample cannot.

The sale goes through the till. The retailer sees a purchase, the brand’s scan data counts it, and the category manager has nothing to object to, which matters on the Venue fader more than most briefs admit. The brand pays only for claims, and not every buyer claims. That gap is the fall-away from chapter 4, and like any well-placed friction it can fund a more generous offer, provided it is priced before launch rather than hoped for afterwards. Every claim arrives with proof of purchase and, with consent, a way to follow up, so a Harvester rides along without the stranger noticing. And the promise of money back carries the stranger past the moment of risk: the work of claiming comes after the decision, where chapter 4 says friction belongs.

What Try Me Free cannot do is keep your regulars out. Anyone holding the offer can buy and claim, and a regular who finds one will. Printed on every pack in the aisle, it is mostly a refund to people who already buy you, which is the Ehrenberg finding wearing a different coat. The answer is not to stop using it but to stop broadcasting it. A Try Me Free offer does not have to sit on the shelf; it can be sent. Unique single-use codes can go to the people who do not buy you: through a retailer’s loyalty program to shoppers who buy the category but not the brand, through a partner’s customer list, in the box of a complementary product, at an event where the brand’s regulars are not the crowd. The terms can limit it to one claim per household and exclude people who have claimed before.

Targeting reduces the leak. It does not seal it, and nobody should promise a client that it will. The question for the brief is how much leak the budget can carry, and the answer is set by how tightly the codes are distributed. The same offer that is a refund to regulars on every pack becomes a genuine Breaker when it is sent only to strangers. Which brings us to a Breaker that worked and a lesson that went wrong.

## The Pepsi Challenge, and what Coca-Cola learned from it

In 1975 Pepsi began setting up tables in shopping centres across the United States with two unmarked cups. Passers-by tasted both and said which they preferred. Pepsi’s claim, repeated in its advertising for years, was that more of them picked Pepsi.

As a Breaker it was close to perfect. It went to where the Coke drinker was. It cost the shopper nothing. And it solved the hardest part of trial, which is belief, by letting the shopper prove the point to themselves: nobody had to take Pepsi’s word for anything, because the stranger’s own mouth was the evidence. The brand did not argue. It set up a table and let people find out.

The lesson Coca-Cola drew was the wrong one. If people preferred a sweeter cola in a sip, the reasoning went, make Coke sweeter. New Coke was launched on 23 April 1985, the public reaction was furious, and within three months the original formula was back on shelf as Coca-Cola Classic. The usual reading, and ours, is that a sip is not a can. A taste test measures the first mouthful. People buy a drink for the whole thing, and for everything the name on the can means to them.

For a Breaker the lesson cuts both ways. Trial buys the first purchase and nothing more. The product has to win the second, and so the honest scoreboard for a trial promotion is not how many people tried but how many came back. A Breaker that gets a million first sips and no second purchases has proved something, but not what the brief wanted.

## Money back guarantees: take away the risk

Some products cannot be handed out on a toothpick. A mattress, a dishwasher, a skincare routine that takes a month to show anything: the stranger cannot try these first, so the Breaker has to make the purchase itself feel safe. The tool is the guarantee. Pay full price, use it, and if it is not for you, get your money back.

A guarantee moves the Belief fader from the other side. It does not tell the shopper the product is good; it tells them the brand is prepared to bet that it is. That is why its terms matter so much. A guarantee with a short window, a long form and a list of exclusions reads as the opposite of confidence, and a shopper can usually tell from the first paragraph which kind they are looking at. The cost to the brand is the refunds, which the product’s own return history can estimate before launch, and a capped or insured version of the same promise is chapter 7’s “sell the risk” at a smaller scale. Hyundai Assurance, the car you could give back if you lost your job, is the extreme case of the same move.

One caution for Australian briefs. A promotional guarantee sits on top of the consumer guarantees the law already gives every buyer, and it must not suggest that those rights depend on the promotion. Write the money back promise as something extra, because it is.

## Referral promotions: borrow a friend’s belief

The strongest belief a stranger has is not in any brand. It is in a friend. A referral promotion uses that, by rewarding an existing customer for bringing in a new one, and the best ones reward both sides so that the friend is sharing something good rather than selling something.

The case everyone in technology cites is Dropbox. In September 2008 the file-storage company had about 100,000 registered users. It began giving extra free storage to both the person who sent an invitation and the friend who accepted it. By January 2010 it had four million users. In a presentation in April 2010, the company’s founder said referrals were driving about 35 per cent of daily sign-ups, that the two-sided reward had “permanently increased signups by 60%”, and that users had sent about 2.8 million invitations in the previous thirty days.

Two things to hold on to, in the spirit of chapter 1. Dropbox’s basic product was free, so those were sign-ups, not sales, and the same slides credit shared folders and other features with another fifth of daily sign-ups. And the figures are the company’s own. But the mechanism is the point, and it travels well beyond software: a reward for bringing a friend works because it moves the hardest fader, belief, using the one source of it a brand cannot buy.

## How to measure a trial promotion

Ruling R11 in our office says the job sets the scoreboard, and for a Breaker the scoreboard is narrow and demanding. Not entries. Not claims. Not how many people tried. The number that matters is how many new buyers the promotion brought in, and how many of them bought again at full price.

Neither number lives in the promotion. A claim or a redemption is a purchase the promotion can see, and nothing more; it cannot tell you whether that person was new. The first number lives in the client’s sales data, and in retailer loyalty data where the retailer will share it; some retailers can now report how many buyers in a period were new to a brand. The second number needs time, because a repeat purchase happens weeks later. What a well-built Breaker can do on its own is ask, at registration, whether the person has bought the brand before, and keep a way to reach the people who said no. Self-reported answers are imperfect, and they are still better than knowing nothing about who turned up.

## Where this leaves the brief

A trial brief usually arrives as “we want more people to try it”, and the temptation is to reach for the biggest prize the budget allows. This chapter argues for something smaller and harder. Name the stranger: who they are, what they drink or buy now, and where they stand when they decide. Name the risk that stops them, which is almost always money on a guess, effort before the payoff, or a doubt about the product that only the product can answer. Then take that risk out of the transaction: give them the thing, or, where the sale needs to go through the till, send a Try Me Free to the people who do not buy you yet. Cap the cost and say so, and build the bridge to the second purchase before the first one happens.

Aperol in 2024 did nearly all of that in a barcode. The next chapter is about what happens after the stranger has tried you, and has to be given a reason to come back, again and again.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**This is the first job chapter, and it is where trial-minded brand managers arrive with a launch brief. “Free product sampling” has about 1,900 Australian searches a month, but most of them are consumers hunting freebies, so the page should not chase that traffic. The commercial phrases are “product sampling” (about 90), “money back guarantee” (about 260) and the questions a launch team asks. The page has to answer one question better than anything else ranking: how do you get a stranger to try your product, and how do you know it worked?** ## 1. The chapter page (Bamboo, canonical, open text)

**- What is a trial promotion?** - Why do most promotions fail to reach new customers? (Ehrenberg 1994)

**- What did the Pepsi Challenge teach marketers?** - When should a brand offer a money back guarantee?

**- How do referral promotions win new customers?** - How do you measure a trial promotion?


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# Chapter 9: Builders
_Collectables, loyalty stamp cards and repeat purchase: how to bring a shopper back, and back again_

## Thirty tiny jars of Vegemite

On Wednesday 18 July 2018, Coles started handing out miniature groceries. Spend thirty dollars at the checkout and you got one: a tiny jar of Vegemite, a thumb-sized box of Weet-Bix, a packet of Tim Tams you could lose in a pocket. There were thirty to collect. The promotion was called Little Shop, and it was meant to end on 28 August. Coles extended it to 11 September.

Coles sold a collector case to keep them in, and miniature trolleys and baskets to go with it. It ran a Swap Day in selected stores so families could trade their doubles. A Facebook swap group had more than 23,000 members by early September. Complete sets turned up on eBay with asking prices in the hundreds of dollars. And tucked into the thirty was a rare one, a miniature Coles Big Red Hand, with a thousand chances to win a hundred-dollar gift card for the people who found it.

This is one of the rare promotions whose result can be read in public. In the quarter to 23 September 2018, Coles reported comparable sales growth of 5.1 per cent, against 0.3 per cent in the same quarter a year earlier, and Wesfarmers, its owner at the time, credited Little Shop together with its investment in Flybuys. A year later Coles ran Little Shop again. In the quarter that covered the sequel, comparable supermarket sales grew 0.1 per cent. Coles put part of that down to the difficulty of beating the first campaign, and part to the competition: Woolworths had collectables of its own by then.

Both halves of that story are the subject of this chapter. The first Little Shop is a near-perfect Builder: it gave people who already shopped at Coles a reason to come back sooner and spend more each time, for weeks on end. The second shows what every Builder eventually runs into. Novelty does not repeat, and a promotion that works becomes the number next year’s promotion has to beat.

## Repeat purchase is not the same as loyalty

Chapter 2 drew a line between two jobs that briefs often blur. A Builder does frequency. You already have the buyer; they buy monthly and you need them weekly, or they buy for Christmas and you need them in March. A Keeper does loyalty: it keeps your best customers from drifting over years, and it is chapter 12’s subject. The difference matters because the two are built differently. A Builder is a campaign with an end date and a reason to come back this week. A Keeper is a relationship with no end date and a reason to stay this year.

The Builder’s rule from chapter 2 is short: the progress has to look as real on the third visit as it did on the first. Everything in this chapter is a way of keeping that promise. Belief, in the language of chapter 6, has to be stretched across weeks. The shopper who started the set, or the card, or the run of weekly draws, needs to believe on every visit that coming back is still worth it.

## Loyalty stamp cards: why a head start works

The humble coffee card turns out to have been studied properly, and the findings are among the most useful in this book.

In 2006, Joseph Nunes and Xavier Drèze gave three hundred customers of a car wash a loyalty card. One group got a card with eight spaces and no stamps: buy eight washes, get one free. The other got a card with ten spaces and two stamps already on it. Both groups needed exactly eight more washes. Over the following months, 19 per cent of the first group finished their card. Of the group given a head start, 34 per cent did. Nothing about the reward had changed. The only difference was that the second card felt as if the journey had already begun.

The same year, Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky and Yuhuang Zheng studied a real café’s buy-ten-get-one-free card and found that customers bought coffee more often the closer they got to the free one. The last few stamps came faster than the first few. A card with twelve spaces and two bonus stamps was finished faster than a plain ten-space card, though both needed ten purchases. And the customers who sped up most towards the reward were the ones most likely to come back and start again.

Three design rules follow, and they apply far beyond coffee. Start people with progress, because a journey already begun is a journey people finish. Make the distance short and visible, because effort follows the share of the road still to go, not the number of steps. And expect the middle to sag: the shopper with two stamps of ten is the one most likely to drift, which is where a reminder, a bonus stamp or a double-stamp week earns its cost.

## Collectables promotions: the set is the reason to come back

A collectable is a stamp card with a personality. Each piece is a stamp; the set is the free coffee; and the pieces are things people want to hold, trade and show. That is why the collectable is one of the strongest Builders in grocery and also the easiest to get wrong, because the arithmetic of a set is unforgiving.

Do the sum on Little Shop. Thirty pieces at one per thirty dollars means nine hundred dollars of shopping to complete a set, and that assumes no doubles, which in a blind pack there always are. Left alone, that is a long road for any family, and the stamp card’s sagging middle on a national scale. What saved it was the swap. The Swap Day and the swap groups turned doubles into progress, and they turned a private chore into a shared hobby, which is belief borrowed from other people in the same way chapter 8’s referral borrowed it from a friend. The rare Big Red Hand added a small chance layer on top, the Gambler’s seat in chapter 3’s terms, without making the set itself depend on luck.

So the collectable has its own checklist. How many pieces, at what threshold, and what does a full set really cost a family once doubles are counted? How will doubles become progress? What does the collector keep the set in, and does it make the shelf at home do the advertising? What is the rare piece for, and is it a bonus rather than a barrier? And what is the plan for the end, when the people who were going to finish have finished, and the ones who could not are left with a half-empty case and a child asking why?

## Weekly draws and instant wins: a reason to come back this week

Not every Builder needs a set. The simplest version gives the shopper a fresh chance every time they buy and a fresh draw every week: more purchases, more entries, and a new reason to come back before Sunday. Monopoly at Macca’s, in chapter 6, was this at national scale for nearly forty years, with the peel at the counter adding the theatre.

Promo-Monitor’s guide to briefs, the same one quoted in chapter 8, describes the frequency job in one line: “Give shoppers a reason to come back. PRM lets you fund that at volume with a known cost.” PRM there is promotional risk management, the insurance of chapter 7, and the point is a good one. An instant win that pays out often enough to feel real across many visits is a liability somebody has to price, and the insurer is often the person who makes a frequent-win Builder affordable.

The trap is belief. A second entry is only a reason to buy again if the shopper believes it changes their chances, and a single major prize shared among hundreds of thousands of entries rarely feels that way by the fourth purchase. Weekly draws with their own winners, instant wins that are seen to land, and published winners’ names all keep the third visit feeling as alive as the first.

## Bounce-back offers: put the next purchase in the bag

The plainest Builder of all is a reason to come back that leaves the store with the shopper: a voucher on the receipt, a coupon in the pack, a code under the lid that is worth something only on the next purchase. It suits brands that are bought one at a time, where a set or a card would be overkill. Its rules are the same as the stamp card’s in miniature. The reward has to be worth the trip, the deadline has to be close enough to act on and far enough to be reachable, and the offer has to be redeemable where the shopper will next be standing, which is a Venue question as much as a design one.

## Why collectables campaigns run out of steam

Every Builder has an end, and the best ones plan for it. Three things go wrong often enough to name.

The cliff. When the promotion stops, the reason to come back stops with it. Ehrenberg’s finding from chapter 8 applies here too: sales tend to return to where they were. A Builder that has not built anything that outlasts it, a habit, a better-known product, a customer the brand can now reach, has simply moved purchases around the calendar.

The sequel. Little Shop’s second run is the clearest public example we know. A Builder that works raises the baseline, and the next one is measured against a number the first one inflated. Novelty is part of the reward, and it does not come back. The answer is rarely the same idea again; it is a new reason with the same discipline.

The middle. Most people who start do not finish, and the ones who give up are the ones who tell their friends it was not worth it. The car wash numbers are a reminder of how many drop off even when the reward is certain. Build the middle as carefully as the start: reminders, bonus stamps, swaps, a smaller prize along the way.

## How to measure a frequency promotion

Ruling R11 says the job sets the scoreboard. For a Builder the scoreboard is purchase frequency among existing buyers: how often they bought during the promotion compared with before, and, the harder number, after. Little Shop could be read in a retailer’s quarterly results because the promotion was the retailer’s own. For a brand, the honest numbers live in its own sales data and in retailer loyalty data where it can get them: purchases per buyer, the share of buyers who bought more than once, and what happened in the weeks after the end.

What the promotion itself can see is narrower and still useful. Where a mechanic allows more than one entry, the entries per person show whether the Builder is doing its job: a campaign where most people enter once is a one-visit promotion, whatever it was meant to be. That number is only meaningful for closed, one-off campaigns, measured per week and stated with the count of people behind it.

## Where this leaves the brief

A frequency brief usually arrives as “we want them to buy more often”, and it is worth turning that into numbers before anything else. How often do they buy now, and how often do we want them to? How many extra visits is that, over how many weeks? Then build the road. Start them with progress. Make the distance short and visible. Give the middle weeks a reason of their own. Decide how doubles, misses and near-misses turn into progress rather than frustration. And decide, before launch, what the promotion leaves behind when it ends, because the end is coming and the next one will be measured against this one.

A Builder brings the shopper back. The next chapter is about what they put in the trolley when they get there.


---

### Questions this chapter answers

**- Why did Coles Little Shop work?** - What is the difference between repeat purchase and customer loyalty?

**- How do collectables promotions work, and how do you set the threshold?** - Do weekly draws and instant wins increase purchase frequency?

**- What is a bounce-back offer?** - Why do collectables campaigns run out of steam?

**- How do you measure a frequency promotion?** Definition block (quotable, about 60 words): “A Builder, in The Shelf by Mark Alexander of Bamboo Marketing, is a sales promotion whose job is frequency: getting existing buyers to buy again sooner, over weeks. Its rule is that progress must look real on the third visit, not just the first. Collectables, stamp cards, weekly chances and bounce-back offers are its main tools.”


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# Chapter 10: Loaders
_Multibuys, bundles and gift with purchase: how to grow the basket without just filling the pantry_

## Cereal for dinner

In February 2024 the chief executive of WK Kellogg Co, the cereal business Kellogg’s had spun off a few months earlier, went on American business television and suggested that families feeling the cost of living could eat cereal for dinner. A bowl with milk and fruit, he said, cost less than a dollar, and more than a quarter of cereal was already eaten outside breakfast. The company was advertising the idea. The reaction was immediate and mostly unkind. The comments called him out of touch, and the phrase people reached for was “let them eat cake”.

It is easy to laugh, and most of the internet did. But underneath the clumsy timing was a real problem, and it is the problem of this chapter. Kellogg’s sells a great deal of cereal. Most households that eat cereal for breakfast already buy it. If the company wants people to buy more, it cannot simply put more boxes in their trolleys, because the boxes will sit in the pantry until the old ones run out, and next month’s sales will be this month’s sales eaten slowly. The only way a lead brand sells more of something people already buy is to get them to use more of it. For cereal, that means another meal.

Every brand leader in a mature category knows this conversation. The breakfast people try to find a second eating occasion. The laundry people would like everyone to get a little dirtier, and Unilever’s Dirt is Good, which has been telling parents since 2005 that children who come home muddy are children who have played properly, is at the very least a detergent brand making a warm case for more washing. These are long, expensive, brand-building jobs. A promotion cannot do them on its own. But a promotion can do the opposite of them very easily, and very often does.

## The pantry problem: why multibuys often borrow next week’s sales

Run a two-for-one on a staple and the sales chart does something gratifying: it jumps. The question every Loader has to answer is where the jump came from.

There is good research on this, and it is more encouraging than the pessimists say and less than the optimists hope. In 2004 Harald van Heerde, Peter Leeflang and Dick Wittink took four sets of store sales data and split the promotional bump into its parts. On average, about a third came from other brands: shoppers switching. About a third was borrowed from other weeks: people buying earlier or buying more and then not buying again for a while. And about a third was new demand for the category, from other stores or from people using more. An earlier paper by van Heerde with Sachin Gupta and Dick Wittink made the same point in its title, “Is 75% of the sales promotion bump due to brand switching? No, only 33% is.”

Read that as a brand leader and it is sobering. If you already hold most of the category, the switching third is smaller for you, because there are fewer other brands’ buyers to switch. The borrowed third is mostly your own customers paying you early. Only the last third is the shopper really using more, and that third depends on the category. People with more yoghurt in the fridge tend to eat more yoghurt; Kusum Ailawadi and Scott Neslin showed as much in 1998. Few people put more tomato sauce on their pies because there are four bottles in the cupboard.

So the larder-filling deal has a recognisable shape. A spike during the promotion. A trough after it, as the pantry empties at its normal pace. A retailer who has learned that the brand will be on deal again soon, and a shopper who has learned to wait for it. The sales were real; the growth was mostly a loan.

## Two kinds of basket

Not every Loader has this problem, and it helps to separate the two kinds of basket before designing anything.

In durables the basket is a one-off. Nobody stockpiles washing machines. When chapter 2’s kitchen cashback asked a buyer to turn one steam oven into three appliances in one transaction, or chapter 1’s laundry offer rewarded a washer and dryer bought together, the extra item was not borrowed from next month. It was a sale that would otherwise have gone to another brand, or another year, or not happened. Durables Loaders live on the rule chapter 2 gave them: the reward has to feel worth more than the cost of the trade-up, and the threshold has to be one a real shopper can reach on a real trip.

In the grocery aisle the basket goes into a pantry, and the pantry problem applies. Here the question is not “will they buy more today?” They will, if the deal is good enough. The question is whether today’s extra purchase is still extra a month from now.

## Four ways to load a basket that stays loaded

Over the years we have come to think there are only four honest ways for a Loader to add sales that do not come back to bite, and the brief should name which one it is using.

Grow consumption. Only possible where use is flexible: snacks, drinks, yoghurt, things eaten because they are there. A multibuy on these can raise consumption, provided the product is visible and easy to reach at home. For a lead brand in a fixed-use category it is the cereal-for-dinner problem, and a promotion alone will not solve it; it needs a new occasion that feels like a gift to the shopper, not a need of the company’s.

Add what was not there. The best Loaders put a second product in the basket, not a second unit of the first. The dip with the chips, the tonic with the gin, the dryer with the washer. The shopper buys something they would not have bought, and the extra does not sit in the pantry waiting to replace next week’s purchase. This usually needs a partner, another brand or the retailer, which is a Venue conversation before it is a design one.

Trade up. A bigger size, a better range, the premium version. The basket grows in value rather than in units, and the shopper’s next purchase may stay at the new level. Spend thresholds and gifts with purchase are the usual tools, and both are covered below.

Fill the competitor’s space. For a challenger brand, pantry loading is not the same problem. A household with your product stacked in the cupboard is a household out of the market for everyone else for a few weeks, and some of those weeks are weeks the leader would have had. This is the one case where larder filling is the point, and it works best for brands whose buyers switch back and forth anyway.

## Spend thresholds: where to set the bar

Spend thirty dollars, get one miniature. Spend twenty-five on Jim Beam, enter the draw. The spend threshold is the most common Loader in Australian retail, and most of its failures come from one decision: where the bar sits.

Set it at or below what people already spend and it rewards the basket they were going to buy anyway. Set it far above and only the people who were already big spenders reach it. The useful place is just above the typical basket for the shopper you are trying to move, close enough that one more item gets them there. That means knowing the typical basket before launch, which for a brand usually means asking the retailer. Promo-Monitor’s guide to briefs, quoted in chapters 8 and 9, puts the practical half of this in a line: “Set the threshold to stretch the basket, and make sure the retailer’s systems can recognise it.” A threshold the checkout cannot see is a threshold that has to be proved later with a receipt, and that is friction placed after the decision, which is fine, as long as everyone has planned for it.

## Gift with purchase: the reward that makes room for more

A gift with purchase is a Loader with a particular advantage: the reward can be chosen to grow consumption after the promotion ends.

In May and June 2026 Penfolds offered a Grand Cru wine fridge, valued at $1,999, to people who spent $2,000 or more on Penfolds, Grange included. There were 725 of them. Set aside how generous that is and look at what the reward does. A wine fridge is a box built to hold wine. It turns a single large purchase into a cellar, and a cellar into a reason to keep buying to fill the gaps. The gift loads the basket today and makes room in the house for the next basket.

Most gifts with purchase are chosen for perceived value, and that is half the job. The other half is asking what the gift does at home. The cocktail kit that needs the spirit, the glasses that suit the wine, the cooler bag that comes out every weekend with the brand inside it: these are rewards that work on consumption, and they are what separate a Loader that lasts from a Loader that borrows.

## How to measure a basket promotion

Ruling R11 says the job sets the scoreboard. For a Loader the scoreboard is not units during the promotion. It is units, or value, across the whole cycle: the weeks of the promotion and the weeks after it, compared with the same stretch without it. A Loader that sells a great deal in four weeks and gives most of it back in the next six has not loaded anything; it has rearranged the calendar.

For a brand, those numbers live in its own sales data and in retailer loyalty data: units per buyer, value per basket, and, most telling, the size of the trough after the end. For a durables Loader, the number is simpler, the attachment rate, how many buyers of the first product also bought the second. What the promotion itself can see is narrower: the claims or entries that met the threshold, which are purchases the promotion can see and nothing more.

## Where this leaves the brief

A basket brief usually arrives as “we want them to buy more”, and the first question back should be: more of what, and used when? If the answer is more of the same thing, used at the same pace, the promotion is borrowing from next month, and it is worth saying so before the plan is signed rather than after the trough arrives. If the answer is a second product, a better version, a new occasion or the competitor’s cupboard space, there is a Loader to build: a threshold set just above the real basket, a reward that clears the cost of the trade-up, and, where possible, a gift that keeps working at home.

A Loader fills the trolley. The next chapter is about what a promotion can learn about the person pushing it.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**- Do multibuy promotions just fill the pantry?** - Where does a promotional sales bump come from? (van Heerde’s thirds)

**- Where should you set a spend threshold?** - How do you choose a gift with purchase that grows consumption?

**- How do you measure a basket promotion?** Definition block (quotable, about 60 words): “A Loader, in The Shelf by Mark Alexander of Bamboo Marketing, is a sales promotion whose job is basket size. In consumable categories it must grow consumption, add a product that was not there, trade the shopper up, or take a competitor’s pantry space. Otherwise it borrows next month’s sales and leaves a trough behind it.”


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# 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.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**- What is first-party data from a promotion?** - Who owns the data when a retailer runs the promotion?

**- What should a competition entry form ask?** - Why is proof of purchase the most useful promotional data?

**- What consent do you need to market to entrants in Australia?** - How do you avoid a list of competition hobbyists?

**- How fast should you contact a new entrant?** - How do you measure a data promotion?

**- Whose record is it: brand, retailer or spreadsheet?** - What will happen in the first ninety days?

**- Is the consent separate from the terms?** Each question returns a move, never a verdict:


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# Chapter 12: Keepers
_Customer loyalty programs and retention strategies: how to keep good customers without pretending to be their friend_

## I don’t want a relationship with Coca-Cola

One of us has a line he uses when a client starts talking about building a relationship with its customers. In the meeting it has an extra word in it. Here it is without: “I want a relationship with my friends and family. I don’t want a relationship with Coca-Cola.”

It gets a laugh, and then it gets a nod, because everyone in the room is also a shopper and knows it is true. And it turns out there is evidence. A study by the Corporate Executive Board, published in 2012, asked more than 7,000 consumers about the brands they bought. Only 23 per cent said they had a relationship with a brand. Of those who did, 64 per cent said the reason was shared values; only 13 per cent said it was because they interacted with the brand often. And across the study, the researchers found no link between how often a company interacted with a customer and how likely that customer was to stick.

That is a hard finding for a whole industry built on engagement, and it is the starting point for this chapter. A Keeper is the promotion whose job is to keep good customers buying. It is not the promotion whose job is to make them love you. Most people do not want to love their dishwashing liquid. They want it to work, to be there when they need it, to be fairly priced, and occasionally to be rewarded for sticking with it. A Keeper that does those things will keep more customers than one that sends them birthday emails signed by the brand.

## What a customer loyalty program can and cannot do

Australians are not short of loyalty programs. Fly Buys launched in 1994 as a joint venture between Coles Myer, Shell and the National Australia Bank, and about a million households joined in its first six weeks. Today it reports more than nine million members, and it is one of many: supermarkets, airlines, fuel, pharmacies, coffee.

In 1997 Byron Sharp and Anne Sharp, of what is now the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in Adelaide, published the first serious attempt to measure whether an Australian loyalty program actually changed loyalty. What they found was modest. The brands in the program showed a small amount of excess loyalty, a little more repeat buying than their size would predict, and not much more. A loyalty program, it seemed, mostly rewarded people for behaviour they were already showing.

That is not a reason to scrap loyalty programs. It is a reason to be honest about what they are for. In 2019 the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission reviewed the country’s customer loyalty schemes and its concerns centred on two things: the data the schemes collect, and the terms under which points can expire or change. Both are signs of what a modern loyalty program largely is, a data system and a deferred-reward liability, and neither has much to do with friendship. A Keeper can sit inside a program like that, or run without one. Either way, it does its best work when it stops pretending to be a relationship and concentrates on being worth staying for.

## Where a relationship does exist

The CEB numbers cut both ways, and it is worth being fair to them. Nearly a quarter of people did say they had a relationship with a brand, and most of them said it was because they shared its values. Those relationships are real. They are just rare, and they are not built by sending more emails.

The example everyone in the trade reaches for is Harley-Davidson. In 1983 the company founded the Harley Owners Group, open to anyone who owned one of its motorcycles, and it describes the club today as the largest factory-sponsored riding club in the world, with more than a million members. What membership offers is telling: rallies, events, recognition for miles ridden and years of membership, the company of other riders. Almost none of it is a discount. It is a place to belong, built around something the members were already doing with their weekends.

Most brands are not Harley-Davidson, and most categories are not a way of life. Nobody joins a club for their laundry powder. The lesson is not that every brand should try to build a tribe. It is that where a relationship exists, it was built on something the customer already cared about, and where it does not, a Keeper should stop trying to manufacture one and concentrate on the things people do want from a brand they buy often: that it works, that it is fairly priced, and that sticking with it is occasionally, noticeably rewarded.

## What a Keeper is for

Chapter 2 gave the Keeper two lines. It is reward of a particular shape, the kind that is worth more for being scarce. And it is judged on who stayed. Between them they rule out a great deal of what passes for loyalty marketing.

A reward worth more for being scarce is not a discount. Discounts are available to everybody, which is exactly what makes them worthless as a reason to stay: the competitor can match them by Thursday. Scarce rewards are the things a loyal customer can get and a casual one cannot. Access, first look, recognition, a seat that is not for sale, a service that is quicker for the people who have been around longest. They often cost a brand little, because most of them are things the brand already controls. And they mean something precisely because they cannot be bought.

## Customer retention strategies that are really promotions

Over the years the Keeper briefs we have seen work have used some combination of five moves.

Recognition that money cannot buy. Early access to a new release, an invitation to something the public cannot attend, a tier that comes with being noticed. The test is whether a new customer could simply pay for it. If they could, it is a product, not a reward.

Never worse than the public offer. Nothing ends a Keeper faster than the discovery that new customers are getting a better deal than old ones. If the welcome offer for strangers is more generous than anything a ten-year customer has ever been given, the brand has told its best customers exactly what it thinks of them.

Reachable tiers. Status programs are Builders stretched over years, and chapter 9’s research applies: start people with progress, show the distance, and make the next level reachable on a normal year of buying. A top tier only a handful can ever reach is a trophy cabinet, not a Keeper.

Keep the promise. In 2015 Coca-Cola reworked My Coke Rewards, cutting the value of points and adding tiers tied to social media activity. Members pushed back, and the company rolled the changes back. A loyalty promise is a promise in the plainest sense, and changing it after people have earned under it feels to them exactly like being short-changed, which is why the ACCC’s 2019 review recommended clear notice before any such change.

Say thank you like a person. Not a birthday email from a brand. A real, small, unexpected reward for a real piece of behaviour: the tenth purchase, the year of membership, the product registered. Thanks works when it is specific and occasional, and stops working the moment it becomes a schedule the customer can predict.

## Keepers for brands that do not own the till

Most of the brands we work with do not run a loyalty program of their own. They sell through a retailer who does, and the retailer’s program holds the customer, the points and the data, as chapter 11 described. That changes the Keeper’s shape but not its job.

There are two routes, and the best briefs use both. The first runs through the retailer: bonus points or a members-only price on the brand, funded by the brand and delivered through the retailer’s program to the people who already buy it. It reaches the right shoppers at the right moment, and the retailer will usually be glad of it; what it does not do is give the brand the customer. The second runs through the brand’s own channel: a registration, a warranty, a recipe club, a second purchase rewarded on the brand’s own site, built from the contacts a Harvester collected. It is slower and smaller, and it is the only Keeper the brand fully owns. A sensible plan does the first for reach and the second for keeps.

## The liability on the balance sheet

Every point issued is a promise to pay later, and a loyalty program is, among other things, a pile of unpaid promises. Chapter 4’s Liability fader applies here at a scale most promotions never reach. Points that are never redeemed, which the trade calls breakage, quietly fund the program; points that are redeemed all at once, after a devaluation is announced, can blow a hole in a year’s budget. The ACCC found that customers could lose points built up over years because expiry notices were not prominent, and recommended that operators flag expiring points and adverse changes clearly, in the subject line of an email if that is what it takes.

The design lesson is the same as for any Liability in this book. Price it before launch. Decide what happens to points that are not used, and say so plainly. And never use expiry or devaluation to balance the budget in a bad year, because the customers it hits are, by definition, the ones you were trying to keep.

## Who stayed: how to measure a loyalty promotion

Ruling R11 says the job sets the scoreboard, and chapter 2 set the Keeper’s plainly: who stayed. Not how many joined, how many opened the email or how many points were issued. The numbers that matter are the share of last year’s best customers still buying this year, compared with a similar group who were not in the program or did not get the offer, and how much of their category spending the brand kept. Those numbers live in the brand’s own sales and customer data, and they need a comparison group designed before the program starts, not found afterwards.

A promotion can contribute something smaller and still useful: whether the same people come back to the brand’s promotions year after year, which is a rough signal of whether the brand is staying in their lives at all.

## Where this leaves the brief

A loyalty brief usually arrives as a wish to “build a relationship” or “drive engagement”. Translate it before anything else. Which customers do we most want to keep, and how many are there? What would make staying worth it to them, that a stranger could not simply buy? What have we promised them already, and are we keeping it? And how will we know, in a year, who stayed? Then design the scarce reward, keep the promise, price the liability, and leave the relationships to their friends and family.

A Keeper holds on to the customers you have. The last job is the one that reaches people who have never thought about you at all, and it is judged on something other than sales.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**- Do customers want a relationship with brands?** - Do customer loyalty programs create loyalty?

**- What are the best customer retention strategies for brands?** - How do brands without their own loyalty program keep customers?

**- What are the risks of a points program?** - How do you measure customer loyalty?

**- Is the reward scarce, or could a stranger buy it?** - Is any existing customer worse off than a new one?

**- Is the liability priced, with expiry rules stated?** - Is there a comparison group?


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# Chapter 13: The Headliners
_Brand awareness campaigns: how a sales promotion gets people talking, and how to measure it_

## Share a Coke: the campaign with no prize

In 2011 Coca-Cola South Pacific printed first names on its bottles and cans in Australia. It started with 150 of the most popular names in the country. Later runs added Mum, Dad and Mate, and let people vote for the next names on the list.

There was nothing to win. No code under the cap, no draw, no receipt to keep. The promotion was the pack, and the mechanic was a hunt: find your own name, or the name of somebody you meant to call. By the company’s own account, people went looking for names, theirs and their friends’, shared what they found, and searched for the brand in numbers it describes as a sharp rise. The brief, as the company tells it, asked for an idea that would “make headlines”, and it did. Coca-Cola says it sold more than 250 million named bottles and cans in Australia in that first run, in a country of just under 23 million people. That is the company’s figure, and it does not say how many of those were sales it would not otherwise have made. What nobody disputes is the fame. The idea won seven Lions at Cannes in 2012 and went on to run in more than 70 countries.

Chapter 12 opened on a line from our own office: I want a relationship with my friends and family; I do not want a relationship with Coca-Cola. Share a Coke is the best answer to that line we know, and it came from Coca-Cola. It never asked anyone to feel anything about a soft drink. It put the name of someone they already cared about on the bottle and let the brand be the thing passed between them. The relationship stayed where it belonged. The fame came to the brand anyway.

That is the Headliner, the sixth job, and the one this chapter is about: a promotion whose first task is to be talked about.

## What a brand awareness promotion is for

Chapter 2 set out the six jobs and said what each one is judged on. Five are judged on sales: first purchases, repeat visits, bigger baskets, usable contacts, customers who stayed. A Headliner is judged on fame: whether people talked, wrote and went looking. The audience it most needs is often not in the shop at all. It is the journalist, the feed, the person at a barbecue who hears the story second-hand and repeats it on Monday.

Fame is not decoration. It does work the other five jobs cannot. A stranger who has already heard of you is an easier Breaker. A category manager who has already read about the idea is an easier yes at the Venue fader. A brand that people search for during a promotion is a brand that comes to mind at the shelf afterwards. But fame is slow to show in a sales line and easy to confuse with noise, which is why the job has to be named in the brief. If fame leads, say so, and agree before launch what will be counted. If fame only rides along, as chapter 2 allows, it must not change what the shopper is asked to do.

The six jobs pull on the five faders differently, and the Headliner pulls hardest on Venue. Chapter 6 said that a promotion nobody meets does not exist. A Headliner adds a second venue to the first: the shelf where the product is bought, and the conversation where the story is told. A promotion can do well in one and vanish in the other.

## Marketing campaign examples that got people talking

Two tests separate a promotion people talk about from one they merely see. The first is the retell test: can a stranger repeat the whole idea in one sentence, after hearing it once? The second is the join test: can that stranger take part, today, without being chosen? The first gets the idea into conversation. The second gets it into the till.

Burger King passed both with a single sentence: we will sell you a Whopper for one cent, but only if you go to McDonald’s first. From 4 to 12 December 2018, anyone with the Burger King app who came within six hundred feet of a McDonald’s could order a one-cent Whopper, then drive to the nearest Burger King to collect it. The company geofenced more than 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants to make it work. The agency’s own awards entry reports 1.5 million app downloads and $40 million of earned media, and the work won the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes in 2019. Those are the agency’s figures, written for a jury; treat them as claims rather than audited results. The design is what lasts. On the board, the reward was almost nothing, a burger for a cent. The friction was enormous: download an app, drive to a rival, then drive again. And it worked because the friction was the joke. Every person who did it was acting out the joke for whoever was in the car.

Domino’s in the United States found its sentence in a pothole. In June 2018 it began paying towns to repair roads, on the argument that a bad road ruins a pizza on the way home. The first four towns were Athens in Georgia, Bartonville in Texas, Burbank in California and Milford in Delaware; Milford’s $5,000 filled 40 potholes, and the crews stencilled the Domino’s logo and “Oh yes we did” onto the first repairs. Customers could nominate their own town, which is what turned a stunt into something people could join. The reward went to a whole street, the friction was a form, and the venue was the road outside every customer’s house.

Australia has its own. Chapter 5 told the story of the Snickers Hungerithm, which cut the price of a Snickers at 7-Eleven as the internet got angrier. Chapter 6 told the story of Monopoly at Macca’s, which was a Headliner for decades because the game was played in public, on the cup, at the counter. Put the four side by side and they share one thing besides fame. Each is a story about the category, told with the brand’s own product. Share a Coke is about sharing a drink. The Whopper Detour is about the burger war. Paving for Pizza is about getting a pizza home intact. The Hungerithm is about the moment hunger makes you cranky. None of them needed a prize to be interesting, because the idea was the reward.

### The Headliner’S Sentence

Before anything else is designed, write the sentence a stranger would use to tell a friend about the promotion. If it takes more than one sentence, or needs the word “basically”, the idea is not yet a Headliner. Then guard that sentence through every approval: every condition, logo and line of legal copy added later makes it longer.

## A big number is not fame

Some promotions reach for fame through the size of the number on the poster. Great Northern ran one with a very large number in 2026. From 9 February to 7 June, specially marked cases of Great Northern carried a code that opened a game in the brand’s app. Every case played won a voucher for BCF, the outdoor retailer, worth $10, $20 or $100, and behind the vouchers sat a branded fishing boat, a Kia Tasman dual cab and a camper trailer. The published terms put the total prize pool at up to $40,086,455.65, almost all of it in those vouchers, across up to 3.32 million cases. Promo-Monitor, the independent tracker quoted in earlier chapters, lists it among the leading examples of the year, with up to 3.7 million potential rewards.

Read through the faders, it is a well-built promotion. Belief is as high as it goes, because every case wins. The reward is borrowed, from a retailer whose customers fish and camp, which is chapter 7’s second move. The prize pool is a maximum exposure, not a spend, and it can only be reached if every case sells and every code is played. Its lead job is a Loader: it sells a case rather than a six-pack. Fame rides along in the number.

Whether that number made anyone outside the beer aisle talk is a different question, and the results are not public, so we will not guess. The general point stands without them. A big prize pool buys a big number for the poster. It does not buy a sentence a stranger will repeat. Forty million dollars is impressive; “every case wins a voucher” is useful; neither is a story in the way that a one-cent Whopper ordered in a McDonald’s car park is a story. When fame is the job, the money is better spent on the idea than on the total.

## PR stunt or sales promotion?

A PR stunt is something people watch. A sales promotion is something people join. The difference matters because a stunt gets coverage for a day and then stops, while a promotion that people can take part in keeps generating its own story for as long as it runs: every entrant, every claim, every photo of a name on a bottle is another small piece of coverage the brand did not pay for.

The best Headliners sit where the two meet. They have the shape of a stunt, an idea big or odd enough to be reported, and the engine of a promotion, a way for anyone to take part with a purchase or a tap. That combination is harder to build than either half, because it needs the creative and the engine decided in the same room, which is the argument of chapter 5. A stunt with no way in is a press release. A promotion with no story is wallpaper.

There is one more test worth running on any Headliner before it leaves the building: what would the story be if it went wrong? A promotion built to be talked about will be talked about whichever way it goes. Chapter 7 told the story of the Pepsi jet, the prize nobody meant. The next section has the version where nobody was laughing.

## When fame goes wrong

In February 1992 Pepsi in the Philippines launched Number Fever. Numbers from 001 to 999 were printed under the caps of its soft drinks, and winning numbers were announced on television, with a top prize of one million pesos. It worked, for a while: reported monthly sales rose from about US$10 million to US$14 million and Pepsi’s market share from 19.4 to 24.9 per cent, and the promotion was extended. Then, on 25 May 1992, the evening news announced 349 as the winning number. Two genuine winning caps carried 349 with a security code. About 800,000 ordinary caps carried 349 as well.

What followed was not a marketing problem. Pepsi first refused to pay, then offered 500 pesos a cap as a goodwill gesture, which 486,170 people accepted. There were protests, trucks attacked and burned, thousands of legal actions, and deaths, at least five by the most commonly cited count. The cases ran until 2006, when the Philippine Supreme Court found the company was not liable for the amounts printed on the caps.

We tell it briefly, and with care, because it shows, as plainly as anything we know, a simple truth about the job. Fame is a multiplier. It multiplies whatever the promotion is, including its mistakes. A promotion engineered to be talked about needs more of the dull machinery, not less: seeded winners checked against a list, security codes on every winning piece, cover for the error you hope never happens, and a plan for the day the story turns. Chapter 5 called the engine the place where the promise is kept. In a Headliner, it is also the place where the promise is protected.

## How to measure brand awareness from a promotion

A Headliner judged on entries is like a billboard judged on how many people stopped to touch it. The scoreboard for fame has its own lines, and they should be agreed before launch.

Coverage. What was written and broadcast, where, and whether it named the brand and told the idea correctly. A story that remembers the stunt and forgets the brand is coverage for someone else.

Conversation. How many people talked about it, in what tone, and whether they retold the sentence or a garbled version of it. Tone matters as much as volume; chapter 7 and the section above are about what volume without the right tone costs.

Search. Did more people go looking for the brand during the promotion and after it than before? In October 2020 Les Binet, presenting at the IPA’s EffWorks Global conference, showed that a brand’s share of searches in its category, taken free from Google Trends, tracked market share in cars, energy and mobile phones, and tended to move first, by up to a year for cars. He was careful to call it “by no means a silver bullet”. For a Headliner it is the nearest thing to a free, public, before-and-after measure of whether people went looking.

The trade. The tone of the retailer on the phone the following week, the ranging and display the idea earned, and whether the category manager raised it before you did. Chapter 14 is about these people.

Sales, underneath. Fame is the job, but it is meant to sell something eventually. Measure it from the brand’s own sell-out data in the weeks and months after, against the same weeks before, as chapter 15 sets out, and do not hold a Headliner to a sales number inside its own run.

One caution runs through all of it. The figures that travel with famous campaigns, the downloads, the impressions, the dollar value of earned media, usually come from awards entries written by the people who made the work. Earned media values in particular are estimates, built on assumptions about what the coverage would have cost to buy. They are worth reading, and worth reading as claims. Chapter 1 promised numbers in context; for fame, the context is who counted.

## Where this leaves the brief

A brief for fame usually arrives disguised. It asks for “cut-through”, or “something different”, or “a campaign people will talk about”, and it sits beside a sales target that belongs to a different job. Separate the two before anything else. If fame is meant to lead, ask the question that settles it: if this promotion worked perfectly, what would someone say about it to a friend, in one sentence? Write that sentence down. If nobody in the room can, this is not yet a Headliner, and it may be better as one of the other five jobs with fame riding along. If there is a sentence, design everything else to protect it: a way for anyone to join, an engine that cannot embarrass it, and a scoreboard that counts what was said and searched rather than how many entered.

That completes the six jobs and Part II. Part I was about how a shopper decides and how a promotion is put together. Part II has been about what a promotion is for: trial, frequency, basket, data, loyalty and fame, each with the mechanics that tend to serve it. Part III is about the craft around the promotion, and it starts with the people who increasingly decide whether a promotion runs at all, and how. Chapter 6 showed retailers running more and more promotions on behalf of the brands they sell. Chapter 14 is about working with them.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**What is a Headliner promotion?** A sales promotion whose first job is fame: to be talked about, written about and searched for. It is judged on coverage, conversation, search and the trade's response, with sales measured underneath from the brand's own data.

**Why did the Share a Coke campaign work?** It had no prize. Coca-Cola printed 150 popular first names on bottles in Australia in 2011, and the hunt for a name was the mechanic. It put someone the shopper cared about on the bottle rather than asking them to care about the brand.

**What is the difference between a PR stunt and a sales promotion?** People watch a stunt; they join a promotion. The strongest Headliners have the shape of a stunt and the engine of a promotion, so anyone can take part with a purchase or a tap.

**How do you measure brand awareness from a promotion?** Agree the scoreboard before launch: coverage, conversation and tone, share of search from Google Trends before, during and after, the trade's response, and sales from the brand's own sell-out data in the weeks after. Treat awards-entry figures and earned media values as claims.

**Does a bigger prize pool make a promotion famous?** No. A big pool buys a big number for the poster. Fame comes from an idea a stranger can repeat in one sentence.


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# Chapter 14: The New Gatekeepers
_Trade marketing promotions: how to win retailer support when the retailer runs the promotion_

## The buyer who wanted a Harley

There is a story that has been told in this trade for years, and we tell it the way it was told to us. A team from one of the big multinationals took a tea brand’s promotional plans to a supermarket buyer. They had done the work. There was a raft of ideas, every one of them unique, on brand, tied to the brand’s sustainability story and built to move boxes. The buyer went through them politely and did not like any of them. What the buyer did like was Harley-Davidsons. Why not give away a Harley, and some Harley gear?

So that is what ran: a motorbike, with no connection to tea, to the brand or to sustainability. And it went very well, for one reason. The buyer loved it, so it got floor space, and plenty of it: displays, ends and support in store that none of the on-brand ideas would have earned. Shoppers who would never have read a sustainability message walked past a stack of tea with a motorbike on it, and bought tea.

It is not a story about taste. It is a story about who decides. In our experience, retailer visibility is worth more than any brand message, because a message nobody sees does nothing, and the retailer decides what gets seen. The Harley pleased the buyer and the shopper and did very little for the brand, and it still sold tea, which tells you how much that first yes is worth. That does not mean the brand gives up. It means every promotion has four people to look after at once, and the order matters: please the retailer, support the brand, encourage the shopper, reward the consumer. Most promotions do one or two of those well. The good ones do all four. No wonder the people who do this for a living are tired.

### Four People, One Promotion

Please the retailer: visibility, traffic and a reason to back it on the floor. Support the brand: the job it was hired for and the sentence it will be remembered by, with nothing that cheapens it. Encourage the shopper: the three seconds, with a reward worth wanting, odds worth believing and friction worth the effort. Reward the consumer: the person who uses the product, who is not always the person who bought it (chapter 1). A promotion that pleases only the retailer is a giveaway. A promotion that pleases only the brand never reaches the floor.

## One promotion, five gatekeepers

Pleasing the retailer has grown more organised since then. From 1 February to 30 April 2025, anyone in Australia who spent $20 or more on Jack Daniel’s in one transaction could enter the receipt for a one-in-seven chance of an instant prize: a digital prepaid Mastercard worth $5, $20, $100 or $250, close to half a million of them in all. That part of Now or Never is for the shopper, and it is a good piece of design. One in seven reads as possible. A five-dollar card is small, but it is a win today, which is what the Accountant wants, and the higher prizes give the Gambler something to hope for.

The part worth stopping on is underneath. Brown-Forman’s published terms list five separate major draws, each for $10,000, and each one belongs to a retailer group. One is drawn from entries at Endeavour’s stores: BWS, Dan Murphy’s and Jimmy Brings. One from Coles Liquor: Liquorland, Vintage Cellars and First Choice. One from the Independent Brands Australia banners, such as Cellarbrations, The Bottle-O and IGA Liquor. One from LMG’s Bottlemart, Sip’n Save and Thirsty Camel. And one from the other independent stores.

The shopper barely needs to know. The draws are not there for the shopper. They are there for five category managers, each of whom can now present the promotion to their own store network as theirs: our customers, our draw, our winner. One idea for the person in the aisle, five versions for the people who decide whether the aisle carries it. Promo-Monitor, the independent tracker quoted throughout this book, picked it out as an example of one promotional platform adapted across several retailer groups “without fragmenting the core consumer proposition”. That is the craft of this chapter in a sentence.

## What is trade marketing, and who is the gatekeeper?

Trade marketing is the work a brand does with and through its retailers to win the shelf: ranging, display, catalogue, price, and the promotions that make the case for all of them. A trade marketing promotion is one built for the retailer as much as for the shopper. Every chapter so far has been about the shopper’s three seconds. This one is about the meeting that comes before them, where someone decides whether the shopper gets to see the promotion at all.

For most of the history of this trade the gatekeeper was the category manager, or the buyer, and the test was the one we have used for years, S.O.S. Is it simple: can a store team member explain it to a customer in one breath? Is it operational: does it cost the store anything in time, space, stock, training or point-of-sale it does not already have? And does it sell: will it grow the category, or just move shoppers from one brand to another on the same shelf? A promotion that fails any of the three does not get a no. It gets a polite yes and a bad position, which is worse.

Chapter 6 put this inside the Venue fader: where the game is physically met, and who has to say yes for it to be met there. That definition has not changed. What has changed is who is saying yes, and what they now want in return.

## When the retailer runs the promotion

In Australian liquor, the gatekeeper has become an operator. Promo-Monitor counted the liquor store promotions it could find each year from 2022 to 2025. The total barely moved, from 649 to 646. The number run by retailers themselves went from 94 to 222, and 189 of those 222 were run on behalf of supplier brands. In the first half of 2026 retailers ran 128 of the 262 promotions the tracker found, very nearly half, and three retailer groups, Star Liquor, LMG and Hotel and Tourism Management, ran close to seven in ten of those. These are counts of promotions, not of results, but the direction is not in doubt.

The groups do it differently, which matters more than the totals. In 2025 LMG was the largest host of promotions in the count, with 125, and suppliers ran most of them, 93 as exclusive deals across its banners. Liquor Barons ran 54 promotions for suppliers and hosted no supplier-run exclusives at all: for an exclusive in its stores, it runs the promotion. Star Liquor ran 46 itself, 45 of them for supplier brands. Three groups, three operating models, and a brand that treats them alike will get at least two of them wrong.

When the retailer runs it, the retailer chooses more than the shelf. Promo-Monitor found that retailer-run promotions for supplier brands were 86 per cent draws, mostly entered by scanning the retailer’s loyalty card. So the retailer also chooses the mechanic, the entry route and who keeps the data. The brand pays, supplies the product and often the prize, and rents a seat at a table it does not own. That is not a complaint. It is a good trade for reach, and for a mid-sized brand it can be the only door into a few hundred stores. But it is a trade, and it should be made on purpose.

## Loyalty cards and retail media networks

Behind the operator sits the loyalty card. Woolworths reported 10.8 million Everyday Rewards members in Australia at the end of its 2026 financial year. Coles reported 10.3 million active Flybuys members. Endeavour reported 5.6 million active My Dan’s members and a scan rate of 84 per cent. In liquor, the share of promotions entered by scanning a loyalty card rose from 18.6 per cent in 2022 to 30.2 per cent in 2025, which chapter 11 read as a data problem for brands. Here it is a power shift: the retailer knows who bought, and the brand mostly does not.

The retailers have turned that knowledge into a business. A retail media network sells brands access to the retailer’s shoppers: screens in store, placements in the app and on the website, emails, sponsored search and promotions entered with the card. Woolworths’ Cartology grew revenue by 7.8 per cent in the 2026 financial year; Coles reported that its retail media income, Coles 360, grew by 10 per cent. Neither publishes how much of that is promotional, and we will not guess. What matters for a promotion is that it can now be bought as part of a media package, priced by the retailer, run on the retailer’s systems and reported back in the retailer’s terms.

Used well, that is reach no brand could build on its own. Used carelessly, it is a promotion the brand paid for and learned nothing from. Chapter 11 has the move: add a brand-owned step, a bonus entry or a reward claimed on the brand’s own page, so that the shoppers who want more from the brand can choose to give it their name. Agree in the trading terms, before launch, what the brand will receive afterwards: entries by store and week, sales by store, redemption by prize. A report you did not ask for is a report you will not get.

## Who pays for the promotion

Since 1 April 2025 the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct has been mandatory for the largest grocery businesses: Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and Metcash. Among other things it sets rules on promotions. A covered retailer must not require a supplier to fund part or all of the cost of a promotion unless the grocery supply agreement expressly provides for it and the funding is reasonable. Where the supplier is funding a promotion, the retailer must give reasonable written notice before holding it, must not cancel or cut a promotional order by more than a set margin without consent, notice or compensation, and must not over-order at the promotional price. Penalties for a breach can reach 10 per cent of annual turnover. This is general information, not legal advice, and the code covers some retailers and not others.

The practical point is simpler than the law. If a promotion is going to be funded by the brand, it belongs in the trading terms, written down, with what each side contributes and what each side receives. That protects the brand. It also protects the category manager, who can say yes to a promotion that has been agreed properly far more easily than to one that arrives as a favour.

## How to get retailer support for a promotion

Every move below starts from the same place as the Harley: the retailer is a business with its own job to do, and a promotion that helps the brand at the retailer’s expense will not be carried, however good the idea.

Ask before you build. The Harley story is funny because the team found out what the buyer wanted after the work was done. Take the job and two or three rough routes to the category manager early, and ask what would earn the floor. The answer may be dull, and it may be a motorbike. It is still worth knowing before anything is built.

Give the retailer its own layer. Jack Daniel’s five draws show it at full scale: one promotion, a prize that belongs to each group. The same thinking works smaller. A retailer-only bonus prize, an extra entry for card holders, a range only that group carries. The shopper sees one idea; each gatekeeper sees something that is theirs.

Run on the retailer’s systems, not around them. Chapter 8’s Aperol offer let people register for a barcode and scan it at a BWS counter to collect a free spritz. The store did nothing it did not already know how to do. A promotion that needs a new process at the register, a stack of forms or a staff briefing fails the operational test before it reaches the shelf.

Sell the category, not only the brand. A category manager is judged on the whole shelf. A threshold that lifts the basket, a pairing with a complementary product, a reason to visit that store rather than another: these are things a retailer wants for its own sake. A promotion that only moves shoppers from the brand next door is, to the retailer, a cost.

Choose the route before the mechanic. Promo-Monitor’s advice for a brief that needs reach is “a route decision, not a mechanic decision: choose where it runs before what it is.” Decide whether the promotion is exclusive to one group, for commitment, or runs across several, for reach, and design from there. Every one of the twelve suppliers the report treats as leaders had run a promotion of its own across two or more retailer groups; among the other suppliers, 21.9 per cent had. Exclusive deals buy depth with one partner. Running across groups keeps the brand from depending on any single one.

Bring what the retailer cannot make. The retailer has the shopper and the data. The brand brings the idea, the prize, the story and the engine that makes the promise safe: fulfilment, verification and the cover chapter 7 described. A promotion pitched as “we will run it, you just stock it” is easier to say yes to than one that asks the retailer to build anything.

Tell them the sentence. Chapter 13’s test applies in the buyer’s office as much as in the pub. If the category manager cannot repeat the idea to their own team in one sentence, it will not reach the store team intact, and the store team is the last gatekeeper of all.

## Measuring a promotion by retailer

A promotion run through several retailers is several promotions, and should be read that way. Sales by retailer group and by store, from the brand’s own sell-out data or the retailer’s scan data, are the first measure, set against the same stores in the weeks before and after, and against stores that did not carry it. Entries by group show where the idea was met and acted on; they are purchases the promotion can see, not uplift. And the retailer’s own report, if the trading terms asked for one, shows what the brand could not see for itself.

Two cautions. Channels are not comparable footprints: Endeavour reported 1,451 BWS stores in its 2026 annual report, and Coles 988 liquor stores across all its liquor banners, so a straight comparison of totals mostly measures the number of doors. And a retailer’s report measures the retailer’s view of the promotion; it is evidence, not a verdict. Chapter 15 is about putting all of it together into the number a promotion is finally judged on.

## Where this leaves the brief

A brief that ignores the retailer is a brief for a promotion that will be designed twice: once by the brand, and again by the category manager who has to carry it. Add five questions to the first page. Whose shelf is it on? Whose card does the shopper scan? Who runs the promotion, and who keeps the data? Who pays, and is it written into the trading terms? And what does this retailer get from it that its rival does not? The answers do not decide the idea. They decide whether the idea is ever met. Then put the idea against the four people it has to look after: does it please the retailer, support the brand, encourage the shopper and reward the consumer? If one of the four is missing, say which, and decide on purpose whether to live with it.

The next chapter is about the question that sits underneath every one of these: what did the promotion actually sell, and how would anyone know?


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### Questions this chapter answers

**What is trade marketing?** The work a brand does with and through its retailers to win the shelf: ranging, display, catalogue, price and the promotions that make the case for them.

**How do you get retailer support for a promotion?** Give the retailer its own layer (a prize or bonus that belongs to that group), run it on the retailer’s existing systems, grow the category rather than only switching brands, choose the route before the mechanic, bring the engine so the retailer builds nothing, and make the idea repeatable in one sentence. Test it on S.O.S.: simple, operational, sales.

**Are retailers running more promotions themselves?** In Australian liquor, yes. Promo-Monitor found retailer-run promotions rose from 94 in 2022 to 222 in 2025, 189 of them for supplier brands, and retailers ran 128 of 262 promotions in the first half of 2026. Counts of promotions, not results.

**What is a retail media network?** A retailer’s business selling brands access to its shoppers: in-store screens, app and website placements, emails, sponsored search and promotions entered with the loyalty card. Woolworths’ Cartology grew revenue 7.8 per cent in F26; Coles reported Coles 360 retail media income up 10 per cent in FY26.

**Can a supermarket make a supplier pay for a promotion?** Under the mandatory Food and Grocery Code (from 1 April 2025; Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and Metcash), only if the grocery supply agreement expressly provides for it and the funding is reasonable, with reasonable written notice. Not legal advice.


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# Chapter 15: The Scoreboard
_Marketing ROI for sales promotions: how to measure sales uplift, and what entries cannot tell you_

## The company that stopped promoting

In the early 1990s Procter & Gamble did something unusual for a company of its size. It decided that its brands were spending too much on deals and coupons, and it pulled back. Under a policy it called value pricing, P&G cut the frequency of its deals by about 16 per cent and of its coupons by more than half, and put about a fifth more into advertising instead. Three marketing professors, Kusum Ailawadi, Donald Lehmann and Scott Neslin, later traced what happened across 24 categories between 1990 and 1996.

P&G lost share. Across those 24 categories it gave up about 18 per cent of its share on average, close to five share points in each. Deals and coupons, the researchers found, had been doing a specific job: bringing in buyers. Advertising did that job too, but less powerfully. Take the deals away and fewer people came in.

So was value pricing a mistake? That depends entirely on what you were counting. Measured on share, it cost P&G dearly. Measured on profit, the researchers thought it “plausible that P&G gave up share points in return for profits”, and their own estimate, built on assumptions rather than P&G’s accounts, put the gain at more than a billion dollars. Same policy, same years, two scoreboards and two verdicts.

That is the subject of this chapter. Every promotion in this book has been judged on something: sales for five of the six jobs, fame for the sixth. This chapter is about how that judgement is actually made, and about the one decision that settles many arguments about whether a promotion worked, which is agreeing before launch what will be counted.

## What is marketing ROI for a promotion?

Marketing ROI, for a promotion, is a simple sum with one hard number in it. Take the extra gross profit the promotion produced, subtract everything the promotion cost, and divide by the cost. The costs are knowable, if someone does the work: the prizes or rewards actually paid out, not the forecast; the insurance premium; fulfilment and claims handling; the agency, the media, the point-of-sale, the retailer’s fee or funding; and for any discount, the margin given away on sales that would have happened anyway.

The hard number is the word extra. The promotion has to be credited only with the sales that would not have happened without it, and nobody can observe those directly. Every sale during a promotion looks the same at the till. Some were caused by the promotion; many were not. Entries and claims do not settle it, as this book has said since chapter 1: they are purchases the promotion can see, not uplift.

How big is the gap? Nielsen looked at promotion in Australian retail in 2018 and found that the share of products sold on promotion had risen over eight years from 30 per cent to 40 per cent, about $51 billion of sales. Its estimate was that about 48 per cent of those promoted sales would have happened anyway, and that around $11.3 billion went through promotions that generated little or no extra sales. A Nielsen analysis of the United States in 2014, covering 39 million promotional events, found that almost three-quarters of promotions did not break even. Those studies are about price promotion, the discount at the shelf, rather than the prizes and gifts this book mostly deals with. The question they raise is the same for every mechanic: how much of what sold would have sold anyway?

## How to measure sales uplift

Uplift is measured against a baseline: an estimate of what would have sold in the same stores, in the same weeks, without the promotion. The whole craft of measurement is building a believable baseline. There are four ways to do it, and they are listed here from strongest to weakest.

Test and control. Run the promotion in some stores or regions and not in others that look like them, and compare the two over the same weeks. Differences in weather, competitor activity and the calendar fall on both groups, so what is left is mostly the promotion. It is the most convincing method and the hardest to agree to, because it means deliberately not running a promotion somewhere. Retailer groups often make a natural split, though chapter 14’s warning applies: their footprints differ, so compare rates and trends, not totals.

Before, during and after, in the same stores. Compare the promotion weeks with the weeks before and, just as important, with the weeks after. Chapter 10 explained why: about a third of a typical promotional bump is borrowed from other weeks, and it comes back as a trough. A read that stops on the last day of the promotion counts the bump and misses the bill. Set the same weeks last year alongside, to take out the calendar.

A modelled baseline. For brands with years of sales history, marketing mix models estimate the baseline statistically, separating price, distribution, advertising, competition and promotion. They are built by specialists and are best at portfolio questions, such as how much of the budget should go to promotion at all. They are less reliable for one small promotion inside a busy quarter.

Who bought, from panels and loyalty data. Household panels and retailer loyalty data show who bought, not only how much. That is the only way to answer a Breaker’s question, whether the buyers were new. Chapter 8’s research is the warning: on established brands, the extra buyers during a price promotion had almost all bought the brand before.

Whichever method is used, a few things fool the scoreboard every time. Sell-in is not sell-out: shipments into the retailer before a promotion measure the retailer’s confidence, not the shopper’s. A price change, a new listing or a competitor’s promotion in the same weeks will be credited to your promotion unless someone looks. And an out-of-stock in week two makes a good promotion look like a bad one.

## A scoreboard for each job

Chapter 2 said that the job decides what is counted afterwards. Here is that scoreboard, job by job, with the data each one needs.

Breaker (trial). New buyers, and how many of them bought again at full price. Panel or loyalty data, or at least a “have you bought this before?” question at entry, which gives a useful, imperfect signal.

Builder (frequency). Purchases per buyer during the promotion and after it, against before. Coles reported comparable supermarket sales growth of 5.1 per cent in the quarter that included the first Little Shop, and 0.1 per cent a year later in the quarter that included the sequel: a company-level read, not a clean one, but a public reminder that the second run is measured against the first.

Loader (basket). Units and value per trip across the whole cycle, including the weeks after, so the trough is counted.

Harvester (data). Valid, unique contacts with consent, the speed of the first follow-up, and what those contacts buy afterwards compared with similar buyers who did not enter.

Keeper (loyalty). The share of the best customers still buying a year later, against a comparison group. Member counts and email opens are activity, not loyalty.

Headliner (fame). Coverage, conversation, share of search and the trade’s response, as chapter 13 set out, with sales read afterwards rather than inside the run.

## Short-term sales and long-term brand

A promotion can win the quarter and cost the year. The evidence on this has been building for decades. Ehrenberg, Hammond and Goodhardt found in 1994 that price promotions on leading grocery brands had no lasting effect on later sales or loyalty: the bump came and went. Carl Mela, Sunil Gupta and Donald Lehmann followed shoppers for more than eight years and found, in 1997, that they became more sensitive to price and promotion over time, as brands shifted money from advertising into promotion. And Les Binet and Peter Field’s 2013 study for the IPA, The Long and the Short of It, put the balance that is now widely quoted: roughly 60 per cent of the budget on brand building and 40 per cent on sales activation, of which promotion is part.

None of that makes promotion the enemy. It makes it a tool with a known side effect, and the scoreboard should watch for the side effect. Add three long lines to any promotion that runs often: the average price shoppers actually paid, the share of the brand’s sales sold on promotion, and the brand’s share of search between promotions. If all three are drifting the wrong way, the promotions are teaching people to wait, which is chapter 1’s appliance floor. A promotion that is not a discount does not cut the shelf price, which is one reason this book spends most of its pages on prizes, gifts and experiences rather than on price.

## How much should a promotion cost?

One of us once asked a client, a large hospitality business that ran a promotion every single month, what would happen if they ran it every other month instead and kept the difference. The promotion was expensive, and it had long since become part of the furniture. They thought he was mad. It was a serious question, and it is the one this industry has never properly answered: what is the least a promotion can cost for the most it can do, how should the money be split between the prize, the media and the retailer, and what would have happened if the promotion had not run at all?

Nobody in that room could answer it, and the reason was simple: nobody had ever seen the promotion’s absence. There is no universal answer either, and anyone who offers one is selling something. But the question can be answered for any one brand, with the method this chapter has been describing all along: compare the promotion with its absence.

The month you do not run it. A promotion that runs every month stops being a promotion. It becomes part of the price, and shoppers fold it into what they expect, which is chapter 4’s expectation problem. Nielsen’s 2018 Australian study found that 59 per cent of the most heavily promoted items did not react to their discounts. The only way to know what a regular promotion is worth is to stop it, on purpose, somewhere or for a while, and watch. Every other month is not madness. It is a test. Run the promotion in alternate months, or in half the stores or venues, read the difference in sales and margin, and the business learns in a quarter what it has been guessing at for years. If sales hold up in the months off, the promotion was paying for customers who were coming anyway.

Three buckets, one rule. Most promotion budgets go into three places. The reward: the prizes, cashbacks or gifts. The reach: the media that tells people the promotion exists. And the venue: what it takes to be met in store, from display and catalogue to retailer funding and incentives for store staff. Each has diminishing returns. The first prize makes a promotion possible; the tenth adds far less. The first weeks of media make it known; later weeks mostly reach the same people again. The first end displays put it in front of shoppers; the last few stores add the least. The right balance is the one where the last dollar in each bucket buys about the same amount of extra sales. Nobody knows where that point is in advance. It is found by moving money between the buckets, one at a time, and reading the result.

Where our experience points. Without a test, our experience leans one way. The reward is the bucket most often overfilled: chapter 3 showed that the prize pool is the easiest number in the room to argue about and rarely the one that decides the result, and chapter 7 showed that insurance can buy a big headline for a known premium rather than its full value. The venue is the bucket most often underfilled: the Harley in chapter 14 sold tea because the buyer gave it the floor. Media earns its place most clearly for Headliners and for Breakers, which need strangers; for a Loader run in store to people already shopping, the shelf is the media.

Against doing nothing. Every budget conversation should include the option of spending nothing, because it is the baseline every other option is measured against, and sometimes it wins. A promotion that only moves people who were coming anyway costs its full price and buys nothing, and that money is better kept, or put into the product or the price. Saying so is part of the craft. Almost every good idea has a version that works, and sometimes the version that works is the month off.

### The Budget Test

Run it on and off: alternate months, or half the stores or venues, for at least two cycles. Change one bucket at a time, prizes or media or retailer support, never all three at once. Read the extra margin, not the entries, and include the weeks after. Keep an off period or a set of untouched stores in every plan, so the comparison is always there. Expect the answer to move as the market moves, and test again.

## What entries are for

None of this means entries and claims are useless. They are the best diagnostic a promotion has. They show where the idea was met and acted on, which stores and which days, which pack sizes people bought to take part, what else was in the basket when receipts are read, and where the claim process lost people. That is how the next promotion gets better. What entries cannot do is stand in for the sales number, and a promotion report that leads with entries because the sales number was never asked for is a report written for the agency, not the client.

When entries are compared, the rules of chapter 1 apply: like with like, one-off promotions against one-off promotions, the same category, per week where the durations differ, and always-on programs kept to one side.

## Agree the scoreboard before launch

Many arguments about whether a promotion worked are really arguments about what it was for, held too late. Settle it at the brief, on one page, and get it agreed by the people who will judge the result.

### The Scoreboard On One Page

The job, and the one measure that will decide it. The comparison: control stores, an off period, last year, or all three. The data, who supplies it and when, written into the trading terms where a retailer holds it. The date of the read, including the weeks after. The full cost, line by line, with actual redemption replacing the forecast when it is known. The result that would count as success, and the result that would mean doing it differently next time. If nobody can fill in the last line, the promotion does not yet have a job.

Two habits make the page worth having. The first is writing the forecast as a ceiling, not a plan, as chapter 2 asked, so a lower redemption is read as the budget working rather than the promotion failing. The second is publishing the result to the people who approved the promotion even when it is dull. A team that only reports good promotions will never learn which of its ideas were the good ones.

## Where this leaves the brief

Every chapter in this book has ended on a brief, and this is the page that makes the rest of them accountable. A brief without a scoreboard asks for a promotion that cannot fail, because nobody will be able to say whether it did. A brief with one asks for a promotion that can be learned from, which over a few years is worth far more than any single result.

The next chapter is about the other thing that decides whether a promotion can run at all: the rules. Permits, terms and conditions, consumer law and privacy are not the fine print of the craft. They are part of it.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**How do you calculate ROI on a sales promotion?** Extra gross profit from the promotion, minus its full cost (rewards actually paid, insurance, fulfilment, agency, media, retailer funding and any margin given away on sales that would have happened anyway), divided by that cost.

**How do you measure sales uplift from a promotion?** Against a baseline of what would have sold without it. The strongest method is test and control stores over the same weeks; next is before, during and after in the same stores, including the weeks after to catch the trough, with last year alongside.

**How much of promoted sales would have happened anyway?** Nielsen estimated in 2018 that about 48 per cent of Australian promoted sales would have happened anyway, and that about $11.3 billion went through promotions with little or no extra sales. Those figures are for price promotion.

**Do promotions damage brands in the long run?** Frequent price promotion can make shoppers more price-sensitive over time (Mela, Gupta and Lehmann, 1997). Watch average price paid, the share of sales on promotion and share of search between promotions.

**Are entries a measure of promotion success?** No. Entries and claims are purchases the promotion can see, useful for diagnosing where and how shoppers acted. Success is measured in the brand's own sales data, or in fame for a promotion built to be talked about.


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# Chapter 16: The Rulebook
_Trade promotion rules in Australia: permits, terms and conditions, consumer law and privacy_

## The fine print that cost $13.5 million

Between July 2019 and August 2023, The Good Guys ran 116 store credit and StoreCash promotions. The idea was familiar to anyone who walked the appliance floor in chapter 1: spend a set amount, get credit back to spend in store. What the advertising did not adequately say was that, for many of the promotions, the credit only arrived if the customer had opted in to marketing and stayed opted in until it was sent, and that the credit could expire in as little as seven days. About 21,500 customers who had done everything right did not receive their credit by the date promised.

In September 2025 the Federal Court ordered The Good Guys to pay $13.5 million in penalties: $10 million for not disclosing the expiry periods, $1.5 million for the opt-in condition and $2 million for the late credit. The company admitted the conduct. The chair of the ACCC, Gina Cass-Gottlieb, put the lesson in one line: “If you promise a benefit, you must provide it within the time frame you’ve committed to.”

Read closely, none of the conditions was unlawful in itself. A promotion can ask people to opt in to marketing, with their consent, as chapter 11 described. A reward can expire. What the court punished was where the conditions sat. They were not in front of the shopper at the moment of deciding. Chapter 4 made the same point from the other side, with an offer whose catches were printed first: the conditions are part of the offer, and they have to be stated before the dream.

This chapter is about the rules that sit around every promotion in this book. They are not the fine print of the craft. They are part of it, and the best promotions are designed with them in the room rather than checked against them at the end. What follows is general information about Australian rules as they stood in October 2026. It is not legal advice, the rules change, and every promotion with real money in it deserves a review by someone qualified to give that advice.

## Trade promotion lottery or game of skill?

The first question decides which rules apply: is the winner chosen by chance or by skill? A draw, an instant win, a one-in-seven, a winning moment, a scratch card: all chance. In Australia these are trade promotion lotteries, regulated by the states and territories under their gaming laws, and in some of them they need a permit. A competition where entries are judged against stated criteria, the classic answer in 25 words or fewer, is a game of skill. It is not a lottery and needs no permit, though it must really be judged, against the criteria published, and consumer law still applies in full. Where a promotion mixes the two, the safe assumption is that the element of chance brings the lottery rules with it, and it takes very little chance to do that: a skill competition that settles a tie by drawing a name is, for that purpose, a draw.

Two principles hold almost everywhere. Entry must be free apart from buying the product at its normal price: a fee to enter turns a promotion into something else. And the price must not rise to pay for the prize; South Australia says so in terms, and it is a good rule everywhere.

## Do you need a trade promotion permit?

Permits depend on where the promotion is open and on the total value of the prizes. As at October 2026, in summary:

New South Wales. An authority is needed when the total prize value of a trade promotion lottery is more than $10,000, including online promotions open to NSW residents. An authority can cover several promotions and runs for one, three or five years. The rules of each promotion go to NSW Fair Trading at least ten working days before it starts, and if you run it for another business you need that business’s written consent first. Some prizes are off limits, including firearms, tobacco and vaping products, cosmetic procedures and liquor beyond set volumes. Advertising must not show children taking part or suggest that winning is certain. If the terms do not say how long an unclaimed prize is held, it must be held for at least three months.

Australian Capital Territory. A permit is needed when the total prize value is more than $3,000, and the lottery has to be approved by the regulator before it is advertised or run.

South Australia. A licence is needed for a major trade promotion, a draw with prizes of $5,001 or more, and for any instant prize lottery such as a scratch or break-open ticket, whatever the prize value. Every advertisement must carry the licence number, so the licence has to be in hand before the first ad runs. South Australia also sets conditions others do not: an independent scrutineer for draws above $30,000 in total prizes, winners not at the draw told in writing within seven days, publication of winners of prizes over $250 within 30 days unless they ask otherwise, at least 14 days for a winner to claim, an unclaimed prize kept for at least two months, records kept for at least three months, cash prizes over $1,000 offered by bank deposit, and no promotion longer than twelve months.

Victoria. No permit, but conditions. The cost of entering, such as a call, a text or postage, cannot exceed $1 including GST. Prizes must be paid or handed over within 28 days of the draw. Winners of prizes over $1,000 must be published, and if that is done online it stays up for at least 28 days. Records are kept for three years.

Western Australia. No permit is needed if the promotion meets every condition in Schedule 5 of the state’s gaming regulations; one that does not needs a permit. Among the conditions: no longer than twelve months, the draw within a month of closing, a phone or electronic entry costing no more than 55 cents, and, for a promotion run through electronic media, the terms lodged with the regulator before it starts.

Northern Territory. A permit is needed when total prizes are more than $5,000. A national promotion that already holds a permit from another state may not need a separate one in the Territory, which is worth confirming for each promotion.

Queensland and Tasmania. No permit for a trade promotion lottery at any prize value, though the general conditions of each state still apply.

This is why the terms of a national draw carry a row of permit numbers. The Great Northern promotion in chapter 13 listed three: ACT, NSW and SA. Thresholds, fees and conditions change, so the list above is a starting point to be checked against each regulator before every promotion, not a substitute for doing so.

## Competition terms and conditions: what they must say

The terms are the contract between the promoter and every entrant, and the regulator’s first document if anything goes wrong. Good terms are complete, consistent with every piece of advertising, and written so that an ordinary entrant can follow them. At the least they set out the following.

The promoter’s name, ABN and address. Who can enter, with any age, residency or employee exclusions. When the promotion opens and closes. How to enter, the qualifying purchase and any limits on entries. Every prize: how many, its description and value, and any conditions on taking it. How the winner is chosen, with the date, time and place of a draw, or the criteria and judges of a skill competition. How winners are notified and published. What happens to an unclaimed prize. How personal information will be used. And the permit numbers that apply.

Two traps are common. The first is the one The Good Guys fell into: a condition that matters to the shopper buried in the terms instead of shown where the decision is made. If a condition would change whether someone takes part, such as an opt-in, an expiry date, a claim deadline or a requirement to keep the receipt, it belongs on the promotion itself. The second is the clause that gives the promoter absolute discretion to change anything. Since 9 November 2023, unfair terms in standard form consumer contracts can attract the same penalties as other breaches of consumer law, and a promoter’s right to change the prize or the rules at will is worth reading with that in mind.

## Consumer law: the promise must be kept

The Australian Consumer Law applies to every promotion, permit or not. A promotion must not mislead or deceive, and it must not make false representations about a prize, its value or the chance of winning. One provision speaks directly to this book’s subject. As the ACCC puts it, it is illegal for a business to offer a gift, prize or other free item to promote a sale if it has no intention of providing it, if it fails to provide it as offered, or if it is not provided within the time specified. That was the basis for the late-credit penalty against The Good Guys. The maximum penalty for a company for a breach is now the greater of $50 million, three times the benefit obtained, or, if the benefit cannot be worked out, 30 per cent of turnover during the breach period.

The law is not the only cost. In 1999 McDonald’s in Australia ran Monopoly McMatch & Win. The rare pieces were switched from the year before, and pieces from 1998 looked almost identical to the new ones; McDonald’s said the valid pieces carried codes customers could not see. People who believed they had matched a prize were turned away, hundreds complained to the ACCC, and the ACCC announced that it would take McDonald’s to court. More than 5,000 customers joined a class action. According to the law firm that ran it, the court found for McDonald’s. The company won, and still spent the best part of two years in a dispute with its own customers about its own promotion. Chapter 13 called fame a multiplier; so is confusion. A promotion is only as clear as the least clear thing a shopper can see.

## Gift cards, vouchers and cashbacks

Since November 2019, most gift cards sold in Australia must carry an expiry of at least three years and cannot be charged fees after they are issued. Promotional cards are treated differently: a card given free as part of a promotion, supplied with a purchase as part of a temporary marketing promotion, or given by one business for use at another can carry a shorter expiry. That flexibility is useful, and it brings the same trap The Good Guys fell into. A short expiry is allowed; a short expiry the shopper was not told about is not.

Cashbacks carry the plainest obligation of all: pay what was promised, to everyone eligible, by the date stated. The engine in chapter 5 is where that promise is kept, and a claim process that loses eligible people is a legal exposure as well as a bad experience.

## Privacy, consent and the Spam Act

Chapter 11 covered the data a promotion collects. The rules underneath are worth restating. Tell people at entry what will be collected and why, and use it only for that. Ask for marketing consent separately from entry, not bundled into the terms. Every marketing message must identify the sender and carry a working unsubscribe, and an unsubscribe must be honoured; in 2020 Woolworths paid a $1,003,800 infringement notice for emailing people who had unsubscribed. One gap is worth knowing. Most businesses with an annual turnover of $3 million or less sit outside the Privacy Act for now, an exemption the government has agreed in principle to review. The Spam Act has no such exemption: it covers anyone who sends a marketing message.

Privacy law is also moving. The Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024 gave the privacy regulator new powers to issue infringement notices, created a right to sue for serious invasions of privacy, which took effect in 2025, and set December 2026 for a Children’s Online Privacy Code and new transparency rules on automated decisions. For promotions, the practical effect is the same as the good practice in chapter 11: collect less, explain it plainly, keep it safe, and never surprise people with what you do with it.

## Alcohol promotions and the ABAC code

Much of the evidence in this book comes from liquor, and liquor promotions answer to an extra rulebook. The ABAC Responsible Alcohol Marketing Code applies to competitions and brand activations as well as advertising. A promotion must not encourage drinking beyond the national guidelines, which the code expresses as more than four standard drinks on any day or ten in a week, and must not challenge or dare people to drink. It must not have strong appeal to minors, which reaches to prizes and branded merchandise made mainly for young people. Age controls must be used wherever they are available. And point-of-sale material started by a retailer is outside the code only where the producer has no reasonable control over it, which matters more as retailers run more promotions themselves (chapter 14). Venues and bottle shops also answer to state liquor promotion rules; in New South Wales, guideline GL4001 is aimed at promotions that encourage irresponsible drinking, appeal to minors or go against community standards.

In practice the code shapes the prize as much as the copy. A prize built around drinking, rather than around the occasion, is the first thing a reviewer will question.

## The gambling line from 2027

Chapter 3 mentioned a change that has since become law. In August 2026 the federal parliament passed the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill, with its trade promotion changes expected to start on 1 January 2027. The target is lottery-style businesses that operate under the trade promotion exemption while selling, in effect, a chance to win: paid memberships or subscriptions that buy entry into a run of draws for cars, houses and cash.

Under the new law, a promotion keeps the trade promotion exemption only if its sole or primary purpose is to promote trade, it is incidental to supplying goods or services, entry costs nothing beyond the fair price of those goods or services, and it is not part of a system of continuous or repeated draws offered on an ongoing basis. The ordinary promotion in this book, buy the product and enter the draw, sits comfortably inside that line. A promotion where people pay to be in the draw, or are signed up to draw after draw, does not. If a design is drifting toward the second, the brief has stopped being a promotion.

### The Rulebook Checklist

Chance or skill, and therefore which rules apply. Permits for every state and territory where the promotion is open, checked against current thresholds, with each state’s lodgement, notification and publication dates in the plan. Entry free beyond the normal price, and the price unchanged. Terms complete and consistent with every ad. Any condition that would change a shopper’s decision shown on the promotion itself. Prize and reward dates you can meet, with the engine to meet them. A privacy notice at entry and marketing consent asked separately. For alcohol, the ABAC code, including the prize. For anything with recurring paid entry, the gambling line. And a review by someone qualified, before launch, not after the first complaint.

## Where this leaves the brief

Every rule in this chapter maps onto a fader from chapter 6. Permits and the gambling line set where Liability and Venue can go. Disclosure is Friction, placed in plain sight. The promise to deliver is Belief, kept. Seen that way, compliance is not the department that says no at the end. It is one more setting on the board, decided in the same room as the creative and the engine, early enough to change the design rather than delay the launch.

The next chapter turns to the machine that is now in every planning room: what AI can do for a promotion, and where the dark art still needs a person. The last puts all of it in one place: the tools, the questions and the checklists that turn the book into a way of working.


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### Questions this chapter answers

**Do I need a permit for a trade promotion in NSW?** For a trade promotion lottery (a game of chance), an authority is needed when total prizes exceed $10,000, including online promotions open to NSW residents, and the rules go to NSW Fair Trading at least 10 working days before it starts. Games of skill do not need one. General information, not legal advice.

**Which states need trade promotion permits?** As at October 2026: NSW above $10,000 in prizes, the ACT above $3,000, SA for draws of $5,001 or more and any instant prize lottery, and the NT above $5,000 (a permit from another state may cover it). WA needs none only if every Schedule 5 condition is met. Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania need none, though conditions apply. Check each regulator before launch.

**What is the difference between a trade promotion lottery and a game of skill?** A lottery picks winners by chance (draws, instant wins); a game of skill judges entries against published criteria, such as 25 words or fewer. Settling a tie by drawing a name brings chance in. Skill competitions need no permit but must be judged against the criteria published, and consumer law applies to both.

**What must competition terms and conditions include?** Promoter details, eligibility, dates, how to enter and limits, every prize and its value, how winners are chosen and notified, unclaimed prizes, privacy, and permit numbers. Any condition that would change a shopper's decision should also appear on the promotion itself.

**What changes for trade promotions in 2027?** Under the gambling reform passed in August 2026, from 1 January 2027 a promotion keeps the trade promotion exemption only if it mainly promotes trade, is incidental to a sale, charges nothing beyond the fair price of goods, and is not part of an ongoing system of repeated draws. Royal Assent to confirm.


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# Chapter 17: The Dark Art and the Machine
_AI in marketing promotions: what it can do for ideas, and where it stops_

## A film star for every corner shop

At Diwali, India gives gifts, and Cadbury Celebrations, a box of assorted chocolates, is built for it. In 2021 the brand had a problem that was not really its own. The small neighbourhood shops that carry its boxes had been through two years of the pandemic. Shoppers had got used to delivery, and the big online platforms were taking the festive attention. Cadbury needed the corner shops to have a good Diwali, because Cadbury’s Diwali ran through them.

The answer, from Ogilvy and Wavemaker for Mondelez, was an ad starring the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, telling people to buy their Diwali gifts from local shops. Then they made the ad name the shops. Machine learning regenerated his face and voice so that he could say the names of individual stores, mapped by postcode across four categories: fashion, footwear, general stores and electronics. Each version was served on YouTube and Facebook to people near the shops it named, so a viewer saw the star recommend a shop down their own street. Shop owners could make their own version on a website and share it. About 130,000 versions were made, featuring around 2,000 stores, and they were viewed 94 million times. In 2023 the work won the Grand Prix for Creative Effectiveness at Cannes, and the award entry credits it with Cadbury’s best Diwali sales. We have not seen the underlying data, and chapter 15 is clear about what an award entry can and cannot prove.

Look at where the machine sits in that story. The idea, help the corner shop and the corner shop will help you, is the four-part rule from chapter 14 done at national scale: please the retailer, support the brand, encourage the shopper, reward the consumer. Nobody needed a computer to have it. What the computer did was make 130,000 versions of it, each one specific enough to feel personal, which nobody could have afforded to shoot one at a time. The person had the idea. The machine did the part that only a machine could do.

That is most of what this chapter has to say, and it matters, because clients now arrive with a different question. They want great ideas, they want the dark art, and they think AI can help. They are right that it can. The useful work is knowing which part.

## Can AI come up with promotional ideas?

Yes, quickly and in volume, and on average they are not bad. In 2023 four researchers at Wharton, Karan Girotra, Lennart Meincke, Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich, compared product ideas from MBA students with ideas from GPT-4. The brief was a product for college students that would sell for $50 or less. The students had produced 200 ideas. The model produced 200 in about fifteen minutes. In a blind survey, consumers were more likely to say they would buy the machine’s ideas: an average purchase probability of 47 per cent, against 40 per cent for the students’. When the model was shown examples of good ideas first, its average rose to 49 per cent.

A second study adds the catch. In 2024 Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser asked 300 people to write very short stories, some with no help, some with one idea from an AI and some with a choice of up to five. With the most help, the stories were judged 8.1 per cent more novel and 9 per cent more useful. The writers who gained most were the ones who scored lowest on a test of creative thinking; the most creative writers gained little. And the stories written with an AI idea were 10.7 per cent more similar to each other than the stories written without.

Put those two findings next to the promotion aisle. AI raises the floor: a team that would have produced a weak list produces a decent one, fast. It also narrows the field: everyone who asks the same machine a similar question gets neighbouring answers. For a lot of marketing that may not matter much. For promotions it matters a great deal, because a promotion lives or dies at the shelf next to other promotions, and chapter 13 showed that the fame job depends on being the one idea people retell. If your competitor asked the same model for “a Diwali promotion for a chocolate gift box”, you have both got the same list. The value is in what you do next.

## Where AI helps a promotion, and where it does not

The clearest public evidence on that question comes from a 2023 experiment by researchers from Harvard Business School and other universities with 758 consultants at Boston Consulting Group. On tasks the researchers had chosen to sit inside what AI could do well, consultants with GPT-4 completed 12.2 per cent more tasks, 25.1 per cent faster, and produced work judged more than 40 per cent better than a control group. On a task chosen to sit just outside it, a business problem built so that the model’s answer would be wrong unless the person checked the evidence, consultants using AI were 19 percentage points less likely to reach the right answer than those working without it.

The researchers called the boundary a jagged frontier. The problem is not that AI is good at some things and bad at others; every tool is. It is that the line is invisible, and the work outside it looks just as confident as the work inside. The consultants who did worse were not lazy. They trusted a good-looking answer in the one place it was wrong.

In our experience the frontier runs through a promotion brief roughly like this. Inside it, the machine is a fast, tireless junior:

Range. Fifty mechanics for a brief, sorted by job, in a minute. Twenty ways to say the offer on a wobbler in under ten words. The three-second test from chapter 1, run on every one.

Drafts. A first draft of the terms against a checklist, a first pass of the one-page brief, a summary of every promotion in the category last year from published pages.

Arithmetic. Redemption at three scenarios, the cost if it runs hot, the break-even on a cashback, the sum that chapter 7 says should be done before anyone falls in love with a number.

Argument. The pre-mortem from chapter 18, done tirelessly: every way this could fail in each of the three directions.

Outside it, and this is where the dark art lives:

The buyer. What this category manager wants this month, which in chapter 14 was a Harley-Davidson. That knowledge is in a relationship, not on the internet.

The give. Where the room is in a rule, an insurer’s appetite or a retailer’s calendar. Chapter 7 called finding it the third answer to an impossible brief. The machine has read the rules; it has not watched them bend, legitimately, a hundred times.

The question nobody asked. Whether to run the promotion at all. Chapter 15 told the story of a client asked what would happen if they ran their monthly promotion every other month. That question was not on the brief, so a machine answering the brief does not ask it unless someone tells it to.

Taste. Which of the fifty ideas is the one people will retell, and which is merely the one that scores well. The Wharton study measured purchase intent in a survey. It did not measure whether anyone would talk about the product the next day.

## What our own AI taught us

We have run the experiment on ourselves. In 2025 we built an AI, which we called Trudy, to read promotion briefs the way we do, and we trained its judgment on the first edition of this book. Brands and colleagues sent it briefs and it wrote back. Before writing this chapter we went back through its archive: about forty readings, across appliances, wine, beer, snacks, coffee, a telco and a card company. We had remembered it as a machine for saying no. That is not what the archive shows, and what it does show is more useful.

It hardly ever said no. In about forty readings it never once told anyone not to run a promotion. What it did was take the first edition literally. A campaign outside the “optimal four to eight weeks” was marked down, whatever the product. A three-month window “kills urgency”. And whatever the brief, the cure was more. Of the 29 written evaluations it sent in the middle of 2025, 25 told the brand it needed a trade incentive and 15 suggested adding a game or a digital layer, including to one entry that was already automatic and could not have been easier. Almost every promotion sat “closer to forgettable than iconic”, and the way out was always another layer: more story, more prizes, more plays.

That is the Doshi and Hauser finding at the scale of one tool. The machine gave every brand the same notes, because the same notes were in the book it had read. It was still the best reader we had: tested against two general-purpose AI tools on the same brief, it was brilliant by comparison, about 85 per cent of the way there.

The bigger gap was the question. In none of those evaluations did it ask whether the promotion should run at all, or run less often, or what would happen with nothing. The clearest case came in 2026, when it reviewed a client’s year of planned promotions and recommended adding one at the end of the financial year. The client’s answer was that they stay out of that period on purpose: so many suppliers and retailers are running activity then that nobody wants to invest into the noise. Anyone who had worked with that client would have known. The machine could not know, and nothing in the brief invited it to ask. As one of us wrote at the time: “It is those nuances that AI just cannot handle. You and I both know it instinctively but the challenge is teaching a machine about those elements.”

There was one exception, and it is the most useful thing in the archive. In 2026 we built Trudy a workshop mode, with several agents told to argue with each other, one of them cast as a heretic whose job was to disagree with the brief. On an appliance brief, the heretic argued that the answer was not a promotion at all, and an always-on offer that refused to move with the sales calendar made the final shortlist. The machine asked the unasked question once, when we built it a seat whose job was to ask it.

So the lesson is not that AI cannot ask. It is that it answers the brief it is given, in the posture of whatever it has read, and it will only question the brief if someone designs that in. That is why this edition reads the way it does, from NO to HOW, and why Trudy changed with it: it now asks which job a promotion is for before it reads anything, returns versions that work rather than a verdict, and is not allowed to say no. It still does not have the brilliant ideas. That part was always ours.

## How to use AI on a promotion brief

None of this is an argument against using it. We use it every day. It is an argument for using it on the right side of the frontier, and for keeping a person on the other side. The practice we have settled on is short.

### Seven Rules For Ai On A Brief

Give it the brief before you ask for ideas: the job, the person in the aisle, the venue, the budget and the number to beat. Ask for many, then throw most away; the first ten answers are the ones your competitors got too. Ask it for the version that works, not for a score; a machine asked to judge will judge. Give it a contrarian’s job: ask it to argue that you should not run the promotion at all, then run the pre-mortem with it. Check every fact, threshold and rule it gives you against the source; it drafts, it does not advise. Keep personal information out of public AI tools; Australia’s privacy regulator says so in its first recommendation on the subject. And take whatever it gives you into a room with someone who has run a promotion, before anyone else sees it.

The last rule is the one that matters most, and the Cadbury story shows why. The machine made 130,000 ads. A person decided the corner shop was the story.

## AI on the other side of the counter

The machine is not only on our side of the promotion. Two changes are already reaching the engine and the shopper, and both belong in the brief.

The first is fraud. Promotions that ask for a photo of a receipt have always attracted a few fakes. What has changed is the tool. AppZen, a company that checks expense claims for businesses, reported in June 2026 that of the receipts its system caught as fake, the share generated by AI went from none in March 2025 to 70.8 per cent by the middle of May 2026. Those are workplace expense claims, not promotion claims, and the count is small: 1,471 generated receipts from 745 employees at 174 companies. But a promotion that pays cash against a picture of a receipt is checking the same kind of document, and the picture is now easy to make. That moves the engine row on the Kill Sheet. Ask how the platform validates a purchase, and prefer proofs a generator cannot invent: a unique code under the cap, a retailer’s loyalty record, a match against the retailer’s own transaction data.

The second is the shopper’s own machine. In September 2025 OpenAI began letting people in the United States buy some products without leaving a ChatGPT conversation, using a protocol it built with Stripe and released for any merchant to adopt. When an agent does the shopping, the three-second sum from chapter 1 is run by something with no dopamine. The Gambler has no seat. The Accountant gets a calculator, and reads every word of the terms. We do not know yet how far that goes in the aisle. We do know which promotions it favours: a reward stated plainly, conditions anyone can read, and a claim that does not depend on the shopper giving up halfway. That is the same promotion this book has been arguing for since chapter 4, read by a reader who never gets tired.

## Where this leaves the brief

Clients are right to want AI in the room. It makes more ideas than any team, faster, and it never gets bored of the arithmetic. What it does not do is know the buyer, find the give in a rule, ask whether the promotion is needed, or tell the idea people will retell from the one that merely scores well. Those are the dark art, and they are still done by people who have seen enough promotions to know where to look.

So the working answer is a pairing. Let the machine widen the list and do the sums. Let a person choose, and ask the question that was not on the brief. The next and last chapter puts the tools for both in one place.


---

### Questions this chapter answers

**Can AI come up with good promotion ideas?** It produces many ideas quickly and, on average, decent ones: in a 2023 Wharton study, GPT-4's product ideas scored a higher average purchase probability than MBA students' (47 against 40 per cent). But AI-assisted ideas also look more alike (Doshi and Hauser, 2024), so everyone asking the same tool gets neighbouring answers.

**What happened when Bamboo trained an AI on its own rulebook?** Across about forty readings it never told anyone not to run a promotion. It applied the old rules literally and its fix was almost always to add more: in 25 of 29 written evaluations in 2025 it asked for a trade incentive. It never asked whether a promotion should run at all, except when a contrarian agent was built to argue exactly that.

**Can I put customer data from a promotion into an AI tool?** Australia's privacy regulator recommends not entering personal information, particularly sensitive information, into publicly available generative AI tools (OAIC, October 2024). General information, not legal advice.

**Are AI-generated fake receipts a problem for promotions?** In expense claims, one provider reported AI-generated receipts rose from none of the fakes it caught in March 2025 to about 71 per cent by May 2026 (a small sample). Promotions that pay against receipt photos check the same kind of document, so prefer proofs a generator cannot invent: unique codes, loyalty records, retailer transaction matches.


---

# Chapter 18: The Toolbox
_A promotion checklist, a pre-mortem, build or buy, and launch readiness_

## The free meal that was too popular

In April 2009 KFC put grilled chicken on its menus across the United States. For a chain whose name begins with the word fried, it was a big bet, and it had the job every new product has: get people to try it. On 5 May, Oprah Winfrey told the audience of her show that they could download a coupon from her website for a free meal: two pieces of the new grilled chicken, two sides and a biscuit. No purchase. The coupon was available to download for a day, and KFC extended that by another.

Run the three-second sum from chapter 1 on that offer and it is close to perfect. The reward was a whole meal. Belief came from Oprah Winfrey, in person, on her own show. The friction was a printer. Millions of people downloaded the coupon, and within days the lines, in the words of KFC’s US president, Roger Eaton, “have been out the door and around the block.” Some stores ran out of chicken.

On 7 May KFC said it could no longer accept the coupon. Eaton recorded an apology and posted it online: “We would like to apologize to our customers who have been inconvenienced by the overwhelming response.” Coupon holders could fill in a form in store and be mailed a rain check, with a free soft drink added, to be used over two weeks. A class action followed in June, in Los Angeles, calling the promotion “a classic example of a bait and switch.” By the time the giveaway was suspended, KFC had served about 4.5 million free meals.

Eaton’s view, a few weeks later, was that it had been worth it. “The critical thing for us was to get people to eat the chicken, whatever it took,” he said, and the results “outweighed all the challenges we’ve had by a mile.” KFC did not release sales figures, so we cannot score it, and chapter 15 is clear that we should not try. But look at what did and did not go wrong. Nobody in that story had a bad idea. A free meal to launch a new product is a textbook Breaker. What failed was the build around it: an offer with no limit on how many coupons could exist, stores that had not been sized for what the coupons would bring, and no plan for what to tell people if it had to stop. The rain check was invented in two days, in public.

This chapter is the tools we use so that the idea survives and the build gets fixed before launch rather than after. There are four of them: the Kill Sheet, the one-page brief, the pre-mortem and the launch checklist. None of them is clever. All of them are cheaper than an apology video.

## A promotion checklist that says how, not no

The first edition of this book had a tool called the Kill Sheet: ten questions, a point for each honest yes, and a rule that anything under eight did not launch. It did its job, which was to stop bad promotions reaching a category manager. It also did a job we did not intend. A score out of ten is a verdict, and a verdict ends the conversation. Teams learned to argue about whether a row deserved its point, when the useful question was what it would take to earn it.

So the Kill Sheet keeps its name and changes what it produces. It kills builds, never ideas. Every row is a question about the promotion as it is currently built. A yes moves on. A no is not allowed to stand on its own: it has to come back with a named move from somewhere in this book, an owner and a cost. The sheet is finished when every no has one. If a move costs more than the idea is worth, that is a decision for the client, made with the price in front of them, and sometimes the honest answer is that this version does not exist at any price. That is still a better meeting than the one where somebody says it will never work and nobody asks why.

Here it is, in the order we run it. Each row points back to the chapter where the move lives.

### The Kill Sheet

| The question | A no sounds like | The move |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1 · Job. Can three people in the room name the one lead job in the same words? | “It’s for awareness, and trial, and data.” | Pick one of the six jobs; let a second ride along only if the reward pays for its ask (ch 2). If none is true, ask whether to promote at all (ch 15). |
| 2 · Person. Do we know who runs the sum: shopper, consumer or payer; Gambler or Accountant? | The reward suits the user and the buyer is someone else. | Point the reward at the person deciding; feed both pilots with the Dopamine Sandwich (ch 1, 3). |
| 3 · Three seconds. Can a stranger get the offer from the pack before the trolley passes? | The headline needs the terms to make sense. | Lead with the reward, cut the words, show the number of prizes instead of saying it (ch 1). |
| 4 · Reward. Is it above the Insult Threshold for this shopper on this trip? | A two-dollar saving behind a receipt upload. | Concentrate the budget into fewer, better rewards, or borrow one from a partner with spare capacity (ch 4, 7). |
| 5 · Belief. Does the shopper think they could get it? | One big prize and odds nobody can feel. | More prizes, shown; a certain small reward under the big one; winners made visible (ch 3, 6). |
| 6 · Friction. Is every step paid for by the reward? | Six form fields for a chance at a tote bag. | Cut each step the reward cannot carry; where the reward is generous, a step stated up front can fund it (ch 4, 11). |
| 7 · Liability. If it runs hot, do we know the worst case and who pays? | “Hardly anyone will claim.” | Sell the risk, or cap it in time or number and say how many are left (ch 7). |
| 8 · Venue. Does it please the retailer, support the brand, encourage the shopper and reward the consumer? | The buyer hears it for the first time in the sell-in. | Ask before you build; give the retailer a reason of its own to put it on the floor (ch 14). |
| 9 · Engine. Can the engine take the peak: entries, validation, payments, calls? | Nobody has tested it at several times the volume expected. | Load test it, stagger the start, cap per day, script the service desk, write the pause plan (ch 5, this chapter). |
| 10 · Scoreboard. Do we know what would mean it worked, and is the baseline in hand? | “We’ll look at the entries.” | Agree the sell-out measure and the comparison before launch; for a Headliner, the retell and join tests (ch 13, 15). |
| 11 · Rulebook. Are permits, terms and every condition that matters where the decision is made? | The expiry date lives in clause 14. | Move the condition onto the promotion; lodge, and wait for the permit numbers before the first ad (ch 16). |
| 12 · Nothing. What would happen if we did not run it? | Nobody in the room knows. | Price the month off, or test it (ch 15). |

Run on KFC’s coupon, the sheet passes the first six rows almost without stopping. It stops at seven. The worst case was every person who downloaded a coupon walking into a store in the same week, and nobody could say what that cost or whether the stores could cook it. The moves are on the sheet: cap the number of coupons, or the number per store per day; release them by region instead of all at once; write the rain check before launch, not after. Not one of those moves touches the idea. Each of them makes a free meal a promise KFC could keep.

## How to write a promotion brief on one page

The Kill Sheet reads a brief, so the brief has to hold what the sheet asks. We keep ours to a page, because a brief that needs three pages has usually not decided something, and the length is where the undecided thing hides.

### The One-Page Brief

The lead job, in one sentence, and the second job if one rides along. Who is in the aisle: the shopper, the consumer and the payer, and which pilot is flying. Where it will be met, and who has to say yes for it to be met there. The sales number that would mean it worked, the measure and the baseline. The budget, split three ways: reward, reach and venue. The dates, including the date of the review. What the promotion must never do: the brand lines, the rules, the things the retailer will not accept. And one line on what happens if we do nothing.

The last line is the one most often left blank. Chapter 15 explained why it is the most expensive blank on the page.

## Run a pre-mortem before the promotion launches

In 2007 the psychologist Gary Klein described a meeting he called the premortem in the Harvard Business Review. Before a project starts, the team imagines it is some time later and the project has failed, completely. Each person writes down why. Then the reasons are read out and the plan is changed to answer them. The idea rests on a 1989 study by Deborah Mitchell, Jay Russo and Nancy Pennington, which found that people asked to imagine an outcome had already happened came up with more reasons for it than people asked whether it might happen. The study counted reasons; it did not test whether they were the right ones. That is enough for our purposes. In a pre-mortem you are not trying to predict the failure. You are trying to hear the reason nobody would otherwise say out loud.

For a promotion we run it the day before the Kill Sheet’s final pass, with one change. A promotion can fail in three directions, and it is worth asking about each one separately.

Too few. Nobody came. The reward was under the threshold, the odds felt like nothing, the pack was in the back room, or the retailer never put it on the floor. This is the failure everyone imagines, and it lives on the shopper’s three faders and on Venue.

Too many. Everybody came, at once. The stores ran out, the website fell over, the claims queue ran into months, the prize budget went with it. This is KFC’s failure and Hoover’s in chapter 4, and it lives on Liability and on the engine.

The wrong ones. The people who came were not the people you wanted: entry farms, bots, resellers, the shopper who was going to buy anyway and has now been paid to. This one lives on Friction and on the scoreboard, and it is the hardest to see, because the dashboard looks like success.

Twenty minutes is usually enough. If the room cannot think of a way the promotion fails in one of the three directions, ask someone who was not in the room.

## Promotion platform: build it or buy it?

We should declare an interest before this section. We run a claims and redemption platform, so we have a view, and you should read what follows as the questions we would ask in your seat rather than a recommendation.

Promotions are hard on systems in a particular way. They are spiky by design: quiet for months, then everyone at once, usually on the first weekend and the last. They are regulated: draws, permits, records kept for years in some states, cash paid a certain way in others (chapter 16). They involve money moving to strangers, which brings fraud with it. And they are short, so the cost of building something has to be paid back by one campaign, or a few. Those four things decide most build-or-buy questions.

How often does it run? An always-on program, a loyalty scheme or a standing cashback, can justify its own system. A promotion that runs twice a year usually cannot.

Can it take the spike? Systems built for steady traffic fail on the first Saturday. Ask what it has handled before, at what peak, and what happened.

Who carries the errors? A receipt approved that should not have been, or rejected when it should not have been, costs money or trust. Know whose money and whose trust before launch.

What has to be yours? Whatever the engine, the customer relationship and the data you were given consent to keep belong to the brand (chapter 11). Rent the machinery if it makes sense; never rent the relationship.

Our old rule of thumb still holds up: if it takes more than two weeks to build for one promotion, do not build it for one promotion. Build what you will run every week. Buy, or borrow, what you will run twice a year.

## Promotion launch checklist

The Kill Sheet asks whether the promotion is right. The launch checklist asks whether it is ready. They are different questions, and plenty of right promotions have launched before they were ready. These are the checks we do in the last week, most of them with our hands rather than in a meeting.

### The Launch Checklist

Scan the printed code on a real pack, from the shelf, not the file. Enter on a cheap phone on mobile data, start to finish, and time it. Read the terms against every ad, every pack and every screen, and fix the ad if they differ. Check that the permit numbers are granted and printed. Check the privacy notice is live where the data is collected and that marketing consent is asked separately. Confirm the stock is in the distribution centre and the display is booked in store. Brief the people who will be asked about it: store staff, the service desk, the retailer’s own team. Test the engine at a peak well above the one you expect. Confirm the prizes are bought, insured or banked, and that the payment dates can be met. Record the baseline and the comparison before the first sale. Put the review in the diary. And write the pause plan.

## When to pause a promotion, and how

Almost no promotion plan we have seen says what happens if the promotion has to stop. It is the page nobody wants to write, because writing it admits the possibility. KFC shows the cost of not writing it. The rain check that ended up being offered was a reasonable answer; it was just designed in two days, with lines outside, by people who had other things to do that week.

A pause plan is short. Who can stop the promotion, and how quickly. What the shopper who arrives after it stops is told, in words written in advance. What they are given instead, whether a rain check, a substitute or a later date, and whether that substitute is allowed under the terms and the permits. Who tells the retailer, the regulator if a permit condition is affected, and the client’s own service desk. And how the terms allow for it: chapter 16 explained why a clause giving the promoter absolute discretion to change anything is risky, and the better answer is a specific clause for a specific event, agreed before launch.

## Where this leaves the book

This book began in an aisle, with a trolley passing a wobbler and a stranger deciding in three seconds whether we were worth the bother. Everything since has been about what happens before those three seconds: the job the promotion is for, the person running the sum, the friction that pays for the generosity, the engine behind the creative, the five faders and the moves for when they run out, the six jobs, the retailer who has to say yes, the scoreboard, the rules and the machine that now sits in the room.

The tools in this chapter are the same book in a form you can take into a meeting. They are only useful in one place: the room where the promotion is still a page and a few people who disagree about it. By the time it is in the store, the Kill Sheet has nothing left to kill. In that room, the most useful sentence anyone can say is not that something will not work. It is which part will not work, and what it would take.

We called the craft the dark art in chapter 1, and said this book was the art written down with the lights on. It turns out to be mostly that sentence, asked over and over, by people who have seen enough promotions go wrong to know where to look. Almost every good idea has a version that works. The craft is finding it, and the tools are how you find it before the shopper does.


---

### Questions this chapter answers

**What should a promotion checklist ask?** Twelve questions, in order: the lead job, who runs the sum, the three-second test, reward, belief, friction, liability, venue, the engine, the scoreboard, the rules, and what happens if you do nothing. Every no should come back with a named fix, an owner and a cost, not a score.

**What is the Kill Sheet?** The Shelf's promotion checklist. It kills builds, never ideas: each no must return a named move from the book, so the conversation becomes what it would take rather than whether it will work.

**How do you run a pre-mortem on a promotion?** Before launch, the team imagines the promotion has failed and writes down why, in three directions: too few people came, too many came at once, or the wrong people came. Then the plan changes to answer each reason. The method comes from Gary Klein, Harvard Business Review, 2007.

**Should we build or buy a promotion platform?** Promotions are spiky, regulated, fraud-prone and short. Build what runs every week; buy or borrow what runs twice a year. Whatever the engine, keep the customer relationship and consented data as your own. (Bamboo runs a claims platform, so read this as questions, not a recommendation.)

**What should a promotion pause plan include?** Who can stop it and how fast, what late arrivals are told and given instead, whether that substitute fits the terms and permits, who tells the retailer, regulator and service desk, and a specific clause in the terms for that event.


---

# The Kill Sheet

**1. Job.** Can three people in the room name the one lead job in the same words?
A no sounds like: It's for awareness, and trial, and data.
The move: Pick one of the six jobs and let a second come along only if the reward pays for it. If none of them is true, it's worth asking whether to run a promotion at all.

**2. Person.** Do we know who's really deciding, and whether they want a long shot or a sure thing?
A no sounds like: The reward suits the user and the buyer is someone else.
The move: Point the reward at the person making the decision. One mechanic can suit both kinds of shopper: a few big prizes over lots of small, likely ones.

**3. Three seconds.** Can a stranger get the offer from the pack before the trolley passes?
A no sounds like: The headline needs the terms to make sense.
The move: Lead with the reward, cut the words, and show how many prizes there are rather than describing them.

**4. Reward.** Is the reward worth the effort for this shopper? (The line is the Insult Threshold.)
A no sounds like: A two-dollar saving behind a receipt upload.
The move: Put the budget into fewer, better rewards, or borrow one from a partner with something to spare.

**5. Belief.** Does the shopper think they could get it?
A no sounds like: One big prize and odds nobody can feel.
The move: Show more prizes, add a small reward people are sure to get under the big one, and let people see the winners.

**6. Friction.** Is every step paid for by the reward?
A no sounds like: Six form fields for a chance at a tote bag.
The move: Cut any step the reward can't justify. If the reward is generous, a step that's clear up front can help pay for it.

**7. Liability.** If far more people take it up than planned, do we know the worst case and who pays?
A no sounds like: Hardly anyone will claim.
The move: Insure the risk, or cap it by time or number and tell people how many are left.

**8. Venue.** Does it please the retailer, support the brand, encourage the shopper and reward the consumer?
A no sounds like: The buyer hears it for the first time in the sell-in.
The move: Talk to the retailer before you build, and give the store its own reason to get behind it.

**9. Engine.** Can the systems handle the busiest day: entries, checks, payments and calls?
A no sounds like: Nobody has tested it at several times the volume expected.
The move: Test it at the busiest day you can imagine, stagger the start, set daily caps, brief the service desk and agree how you'd pause it.

**10. Scoreboard.** Do we know what would mean it worked, and is the baseline in hand?
A no sounds like: We'll look at the entries.
The move: Agree the sales measure and what you'll compare it with before launch. If the job is fame, check whether people retell it.

**11. Rulebook.** Are permits, terms and every condition that matters where the decision is made?
A no sounds like: The expiry date lives in clause 14.
The move: Put the condition on the promotion itself. Lodge the permits and wait for the numbers before the first ad runs.

**12. Nothing.** What would happen if we did not run it?
A no sounds like: Nobody in the room knows.
The move: Work out what a month off would cost, or test it.

Cite as: Alexander, M. (2026). The Shelf, 2026 edition. Bamboo Marketing, Sydney. https://theshelfbook.com.au/