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How Is One Winner Chosen From All Postal, Online, Phone & Text Entries?

If you’re a long time ITV viewer like me, you’ll know that from time to time, the competition presenters like Andi Peters feel that it’s necessary to reinforce the fact that all entries count when you enter their competitions, and more importantly all entries have an equal chance of winning.

You might be wondering how that’s possible, when most competitions have four different methods of entry. We’ll go into more detail on that below.

Those four methods are:

  • Online Entry
    These days, all competitions get added to the ITV Win portal, so you can find them all in one place. That’s not always been the case – in years gone by they were found in each show’s section of the ITV website and were a pain to find!
  • SMS Entry
    Send a shortcode to a premium rate number on the prize draw trailers in the shows.
  • Phone Entry
    Enter by calling the premium rate number shown on screen during competition segments.
  • Postal Entry
    Send your name and address to the postal address in the competition promotions, which is the free entry route, but you’ll need to pay for a stamp.

How are Entries Into ITV Competitions Combined To Select A Winner?

We’ve seen load of people ask the same question, or at least a very similar one, so here’s how it works.

All the entries are given a unique entry code – a sort of virtual entry number so that they can all be treated the same way.

Let’s consider each of the four methods again.

  • Online Entry
    This is the easy one, as when people enter a competition, their details of entry go straight into the prize draw database and their payment is collected (e.g. via PayPal)
  • SMS Entry
    It’s quite easy to export a huge file of text messages that are received into a database, so like the web entries, SMS entries are almost certainly all automated. Payment is collected like any other text message through the entrant’s mobile bill.
  • Phone Entry
    Slightly more complicated is getting the viewer’s details from a phone call entry, as they’re spoken rather than typed, as is the case with the website and text message entries.

    You can’t just use the caller ID from the phone call either, as some people withhold their number and there’s no requirement in the terms and conditions to use your own phone anyway, just to get the bill payer’s permission to make the call.

    However, given a little thought, this probably isn’t a huge problem – all ITV need to do is register the entry, at this stage it’s not critical to know who it’s from. So, simply assigning a virtual entry number to the phone call is enough to get it in the draw – if it happens to win, they’ll know which call it related to in order to listen to the message and contact the winner.
  • Postal Entry
    When people ask the question about how all entries are treated equally, more often than not, they’re really being sceptical about whether the free postal entries are counted the same as paid alternatives. The answer is clearly yes!

    This is fairly labour intensive for ITV (or their partners!) to process, as each entry needs to be sorted and assigned a number. You might have noticed that for all competitions with a postal entry option, they all go to the same address, only the first line changes. For example, GMB competitions tend to have a first line starting BK followed by two numbers. For This Morning prizes, it’s DY.

    That probably goes a long way to explaining why the postal entries are always presented as a footnote to the promotional segments – that and they’re entries ITV make no money from! In fact, offering postal entry almost certainly costs them money, but it’s legally required to prevent the draws falling under gambling regulations.

    Back on track, once each postal entry has been sorted by the first line of the address, it can be manually assigned with it’s unique virtual entry number. We’ve also heard from a very reliable source that the details are manually added to the entries database at this point, simply because searching for the right one manually if it wins after the draw is made could prove difficult – unlike digitally stored web, text and phone entries.

So, there you have it, all entries can be assigned a unique code regardless of how the entry is made, so that when the winner is selected, there’s no need to even know how the entry was submitted.

I Read Postal Entries Have No Chance Of Winning!

For competition operators, trust is a very big deal, so it’s really unhelpful when mistakes are made. There have been some key stories affecting ITV competitions in the news in approximately twenty years of operation. The first was back in 2007 when according to a BBC news story, winners were selected based on where they lived, when competition rules require all entries to have an equal chance to win.

There have also been accusations that producers were so keen to announce winners live on air, there have been times when winners have been chosen before lines close, meaning that late entries have no chance of winning. To our knowledge, these accusations were never found to be accurate once investigated.

Regardless of the mistakes made in the past, the point remains that trust is vital for these competitions to run, so it’s highly likely that ITV have more stringent checks in place today.

Do Postal Entries Ever Win?

Postal entries have won competitions in the past, although ITV don’t generally break down the winners in this way so there’s no way to know how many. Occasionally you’ll hear Andi Peters referring to something along these lines when he’s speaking to past winners while presenting competition segments though.

It’s likely that most winners enter online through the ITV website, as it’s most heavily marketed as the cheapest way to enter.

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