Scratchcards and friends
Dec. 26th, 2010 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chrisWe had a quiet Christmas, but it was lots of fun. While Meg and I chose not to exchange gifts, we baked cookies, played games (Can't Stop and Dominoes), watched TV, talked to family and Meg made a brilliant roast beef dinner. A gentle Christmas, but just what we wanted. I hope your day was at least as happy as ours, but it'll have to go some way to match it.
I've been thinking about scratchcards recently. Someone at work won £50 on a £2 Scrabble-themed scratchcard, then (the excellent) Shift Run Stop's Leila pointed to this long web page. The first half contains information about a marketing company's work for Shell, and other clients, mostly over the late '70s and early '80s. It's fascinating. The second half of the page contains links to ongoing legal action and criticism of the company, allegedly inspired by a dispute over one particular campaign. It's less to my taste, but there's enough in the first half to get me thinking.
Apparently scratchcards as such date from the mid-'70s, though there were similar promotions dating back to at least the 1950s and, quite probably, very long before. Pull tabs, which are almost identical in gameplay terms to scratchcards, are at least a little older than them; they are still prevalent in Alaska and might be the only form of the genre permitted by law. It's not too great a stretch to compare both forms to punchboards, which can be traced back to the eighteenth century, though it seems to me to be more of a stretch than I'd like to say "well, they're all lotteries, and lotteries go back to the Romans, or maybe the Chinese before them" - I'm interested in the factor form, the potential for instantly knowing you've won.
I remember UK charity scratchcards from the early '80s. These would be sold for, habitually, 25p (very occasionally less) and often offered five to seven marginally different scratch-off decisions for your money. These days. these are relatively rare, because the National Lottery's scratchcards are so prevalent, though the minimum ticket prize of £1 (with some tickets costing as much as a fiver) is a rather higher stake than I'd like. The Scrabble scratchcard is not untypical; £2 to play, three slightly different decision mechanics, eight decisions and a whopping 64% of ticket fees due to be returned in prizes.
About 2 tickets in 9 win, but 41% of the wins are just the £2 card fee returned, and thus it's only something like a 1-in-8 shot of turning a positive profit. Even among the profitable cards, 25% of the wins are for £3, so it's a 1-in-14 shot of making more than a £1 profit on a £2 card; something like 13% of the wins are for £5, so it's a 1-in-23 shot of making more than £3 profit on a £2 card; half of those wins are only for £10, most of the rest are £20 wins and so on. It's very hard to win serious money; it was something like 1-in-300 against winning £50 or more, as my friend did, and it's about 1 in 3,000,000 against winning the £60,000 jackpot. In short, in the long term, scratchcards that you have to pay are a losing game. Don't buy 'em. They're even bad business compared to most gambling opportunities.
However, I'm not opposed to all scratchcards, just the ones you have to buy. The ones that are given away as promotions are definitely relevant to my interest. Of course they aren't going to be free, as there are the costs of the prizes to recoup, as well as the non-trivial cost of producing the scratchcards; in general, the promoters offering them will recoup their costs somehow, most likely by putting the cost of the things they sell very slightly, but often scratchcards are given away on a "no purchase necessary" basis, so you can get them at no cost in the short term.
There was quite a bit of interesting design that went into scratchcards and related promotions over the years, in a way that doesn't happen now, and the first half of that page has a lot of interesting links. (The "Free Lines" football pools promotion is a particularly neat design, and I enjoyed reading about the Guinness challenges.) Having been born in the UK in 1975, I think I ought to remember rather more of them than I actually do! That article does bring back some memories: I remember Mobil's Scrabble promotion, I remember scratchcards on KitKat wrappers, where you could usually win 1p, and I can remember McDonalds running Trivial Pursuit scratchcards as well. No purchase was necessary; scratchcards offered two questions, each with four multiple-choice answers. Scratch off one answer on whichever question you prefer, with a correct answer earning you a prize: more often than not their smallest drink, burger or portion of fries, to be claimed on a subsequent visit.
The "Bruce's Lucky Deal" promotion is particularly brilliant and quite sophisticated in its own quiet way, by virtue of its "every card can win" premise. The concept is that players scratched off four spaces from a choice of eight, representing playing cards in "Bruce's hand", then another four from a choice of eight in "your hand". Revealing eight cards that were all spades won a £10,000 prize, eight cards that were all hearts won a £100 prize, eight diamonds or eight clubs won a pack of playing cards (which might contain a special card worth £50) and a mix of suits won nothing. Additionally, all eight cards being jacks or higher won a share of a jackpot - £100,000 being split 880 ways in the first fortnight, for instance.
Despite the "every card can win" premise, the operators could make payouts rare; if they were to make only four of the eight cards spades in each hand, it would be a 1-in-70 shot, twice in a row, to reveal eight spades out of eight. I anticipate that cards with potential winning combinations in spades were rather rare in the first place; I would guess that most cards had a possible win in diamonds or clubs, with insufficiently many hearts or spades to win either of those. Scratchcards seem to be reasonably cheat-proof in practice, though other related promotions have occasionally proved flawed in the past; offering shares of jackpots as prizes guarantees a limit on the payout, but not knowing exactly how much you'd win at once is a bit less fun.
There's no good reason why promotional scratchcards couldn't ride again, which suggests that it's probably just a matter of time before they really do. It's not as if there aren't scores of bright young things designing exciting promotional games at marketing companies around the world, but promotions often tend to be virtual; ARGs and apps (Facebook, or choose the mobile phone OS of your choice...) are the flavour of the month that has driven the traditional printed scratchcard slightly out of business. That said, we did get a promotional code printed - almost illegibly, black-on-black, for entirely reasonable security reasons - on the inside of a packet of pricy branded kitchen rolls, which I have checked online and apparently it is worth £10. Must be nice...
Another technique I've seen used (so far exclusively online, though it's not so far from being a variant of the old "caller 96 after this song wins a prize" radio promotion...) to declare a predictable number of entrants to be instant winners of preset prizes, often used for many winners of small prizes, is to randomly select winning times throughout the promotional period and declare that the first entry received after each of those winning times (though perhaps they may "stack", if you get two or more winning times without an entry between them) to be a winner. I'm reasonably confident that you can take advantage of the uniform distribution of winning times and the presumed non-uniform distribution of entries by checking at a time of day when you suspect few checks will be made. (5am local time is good, especially if you're a night shift worker.)
It's possible that that was the technique used on the kitchen rolls, with the codes being used to retrospectively connect winners with winning times, rather than to determine who has a winning packet. It's impossible to tell. The "first after random time" technique is useful to guarantee a fixed number of winners, assuming sufficiently many participants at the correct times, while permitting instant notification of winning. There doesn't seem to be any danger of (significant numbers of) prizes going unclaimed, as there might be if there actually are such things as winning codes, rather than just winning claim times, and it's not easy to see why this would be in the promoter's interest. Has there been a legislation change to require all advertised prizes to be paid out, rather than to permit them to go unclaimed? Is it relevant that the same game was to be played both in the UK and in Ireland, thus had to be adaptable to both jurisdictions?
I do think scratchcards will come back some day, possibly with slight technological twists. After all, loyalty clubs (Nectar, Tesco Clubcard) and the like are nothing but updated versions of Green Shield Stamps. Airlines have long offered frequent flyer scrip in schemes of legendary complexity. While the existence of points, and thus a scoring scheme, does not necessarily create a game - or, at least, an interesting one (see Holly and Margaret, last October), interesting games and game-like promotion schemes have been brought to fruition in the past this way and there's definitely scope for game designers to make them happen again in the future. Brands may well reap the rewards when they do.
I've been thinking about scratchcards recently. Someone at work won £50 on a £2 Scrabble-themed scratchcard, then (the excellent) Shift Run Stop's Leila pointed to this long web page. The first half contains information about a marketing company's work for Shell, and other clients, mostly over the late '70s and early '80s. It's fascinating. The second half of the page contains links to ongoing legal action and criticism of the company, allegedly inspired by a dispute over one particular campaign. It's less to my taste, but there's enough in the first half to get me thinking.
Apparently scratchcards as such date from the mid-'70s, though there were similar promotions dating back to at least the 1950s and, quite probably, very long before. Pull tabs, which are almost identical in gameplay terms to scratchcards, are at least a little older than them; they are still prevalent in Alaska and might be the only form of the genre permitted by law. It's not too great a stretch to compare both forms to punchboards, which can be traced back to the eighteenth century, though it seems to me to be more of a stretch than I'd like to say "well, they're all lotteries, and lotteries go back to the Romans, or maybe the Chinese before them" - I'm interested in the factor form, the potential for instantly knowing you've won.
I remember UK charity scratchcards from the early '80s. These would be sold for, habitually, 25p (very occasionally less) and often offered five to seven marginally different scratch-off decisions for your money. These days. these are relatively rare, because the National Lottery's scratchcards are so prevalent, though the minimum ticket prize of £1 (with some tickets costing as much as a fiver) is a rather higher stake than I'd like. The Scrabble scratchcard is not untypical; £2 to play, three slightly different decision mechanics, eight decisions and a whopping 64% of ticket fees due to be returned in prizes.
About 2 tickets in 9 win, but 41% of the wins are just the £2 card fee returned, and thus it's only something like a 1-in-8 shot of turning a positive profit. Even among the profitable cards, 25% of the wins are for £3, so it's a 1-in-14 shot of making more than a £1 profit on a £2 card; something like 13% of the wins are for £5, so it's a 1-in-23 shot of making more than £3 profit on a £2 card; half of those wins are only for £10, most of the rest are £20 wins and so on. It's very hard to win serious money; it was something like 1-in-300 against winning £50 or more, as my friend did, and it's about 1 in 3,000,000 against winning the £60,000 jackpot. In short, in the long term, scratchcards that you have to pay are a losing game. Don't buy 'em. They're even bad business compared to most gambling opportunities.
However, I'm not opposed to all scratchcards, just the ones you have to buy. The ones that are given away as promotions are definitely relevant to my interest. Of course they aren't going to be free, as there are the costs of the prizes to recoup, as well as the non-trivial cost of producing the scratchcards; in general, the promoters offering them will recoup their costs somehow, most likely by putting the cost of the things they sell very slightly, but often scratchcards are given away on a "no purchase necessary" basis, so you can get them at no cost in the short term.
There was quite a bit of interesting design that went into scratchcards and related promotions over the years, in a way that doesn't happen now, and the first half of that page has a lot of interesting links. (The "Free Lines" football pools promotion is a particularly neat design, and I enjoyed reading about the Guinness challenges.) Having been born in the UK in 1975, I think I ought to remember rather more of them than I actually do! That article does bring back some memories: I remember Mobil's Scrabble promotion, I remember scratchcards on KitKat wrappers, where you could usually win 1p, and I can remember McDonalds running Trivial Pursuit scratchcards as well. No purchase was necessary; scratchcards offered two questions, each with four multiple-choice answers. Scratch off one answer on whichever question you prefer, with a correct answer earning you a prize: more often than not their smallest drink, burger or portion of fries, to be claimed on a subsequent visit.
The "Bruce's Lucky Deal" promotion is particularly brilliant and quite sophisticated in its own quiet way, by virtue of its "every card can win" premise. The concept is that players scratched off four spaces from a choice of eight, representing playing cards in "Bruce's hand", then another four from a choice of eight in "your hand". Revealing eight cards that were all spades won a £10,000 prize, eight cards that were all hearts won a £100 prize, eight diamonds or eight clubs won a pack of playing cards (which might contain a special card worth £50) and a mix of suits won nothing. Additionally, all eight cards being jacks or higher won a share of a jackpot - £100,000 being split 880 ways in the first fortnight, for instance.
Despite the "every card can win" premise, the operators could make payouts rare; if they were to make only four of the eight cards spades in each hand, it would be a 1-in-70 shot, twice in a row, to reveal eight spades out of eight. I anticipate that cards with potential winning combinations in spades were rather rare in the first place; I would guess that most cards had a possible win in diamonds or clubs, with insufficiently many hearts or spades to win either of those. Scratchcards seem to be reasonably cheat-proof in practice, though other related promotions have occasionally proved flawed in the past; offering shares of jackpots as prizes guarantees a limit on the payout, but not knowing exactly how much you'd win at once is a bit less fun.
There's no good reason why promotional scratchcards couldn't ride again, which suggests that it's probably just a matter of time before they really do. It's not as if there aren't scores of bright young things designing exciting promotional games at marketing companies around the world, but promotions often tend to be virtual; ARGs and apps (Facebook, or choose the mobile phone OS of your choice...) are the flavour of the month that has driven the traditional printed scratchcard slightly out of business. That said, we did get a promotional code printed - almost illegibly, black-on-black, for entirely reasonable security reasons - on the inside of a packet of pricy branded kitchen rolls, which I have checked online and apparently it is worth £10. Must be nice...
Another technique I've seen used (so far exclusively online, though it's not so far from being a variant of the old "caller 96 after this song wins a prize" radio promotion...) to declare a predictable number of entrants to be instant winners of preset prizes, often used for many winners of small prizes, is to randomly select winning times throughout the promotional period and declare that the first entry received after each of those winning times (though perhaps they may "stack", if you get two or more winning times without an entry between them) to be a winner. I'm reasonably confident that you can take advantage of the uniform distribution of winning times and the presumed non-uniform distribution of entries by checking at a time of day when you suspect few checks will be made. (5am local time is good, especially if you're a night shift worker.)
It's possible that that was the technique used on the kitchen rolls, with the codes being used to retrospectively connect winners with winning times, rather than to determine who has a winning packet. It's impossible to tell. The "first after random time" technique is useful to guarantee a fixed number of winners, assuming sufficiently many participants at the correct times, while permitting instant notification of winning. There doesn't seem to be any danger of (significant numbers of) prizes going unclaimed, as there might be if there actually are such things as winning codes, rather than just winning claim times, and it's not easy to see why this would be in the promoter's interest. Has there been a legislation change to require all advertised prizes to be paid out, rather than to permit them to go unclaimed? Is it relevant that the same game was to be played both in the UK and in Ireland, thus had to be adaptable to both jurisdictions?
I do think scratchcards will come back some day, possibly with slight technological twists. After all, loyalty clubs (Nectar, Tesco Clubcard) and the like are nothing but updated versions of Green Shield Stamps. Airlines have long offered frequent flyer scrip in schemes of legendary complexity. While the existence of points, and thus a scoring scheme, does not necessarily create a game - or, at least, an interesting one (see Holly and Margaret, last October), interesting games and game-like promotion schemes have been brought to fruition in the past this way and there's definitely scope for game designers to make them happen again in the future. Brands may well reap the rewards when they do.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-26 10:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-27 09:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-26 10:36 pm (UTC)In this context, you are really asking two questions at once:
1) Will scratchcards make a comeback as a physical implementation of certain games? (Answer: yes - see beingjdc's comment above.)
2) Will the unique properties of games played using scratchcards reemerge in newer formats?
I think the answer to 2) ought to be "yes" if internet connectivity continues to improve. I can imagine, for example, smart game cards which allow to you play a game and win (or not) anywhere with internet coverage and have your win appear right in your bank account (or shipped straight to your door or collectable from the shop you were next to when you "scratched" the card).
Nor would the cards themselves have to be expensive. For example, perhaps you just scan a barcode with your smartphone and the game part of the card appears on your phone.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-26 10:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-27 10:22 am (UTC)I am a bit surprised that 2D barcodes haven't become a bigger part of our lives already. One sees them around quite a lot for businesses' internal purposes (on packaging and so on), but the only time I've actually been forced to interact with one was when checking in for the Eurostar. You print off your 'boarding pass' when you buy the ticket, and it includes a 2D barcode. Then at St Pancras you offer this printout up to a scanner, and if you're legit, it lets you through the gate. Simple, quick and painless. (Although perhaps this is a factor of me rather than them, and people with advanced phones or with different social habits are using them constantly for all sorts of exciting purposes?)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-27 09:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-27 09:35 pm (UTC)From lj sarakay312
Date: 2010-12-27 11:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-29 01:32 pm (UTC)Down with turkey!
On lottery scratchcards, the word is:
Don't buy 'em.
-- Mr. Chris, 2010.
don't bother with it.
-- Richard K. Lloyd, 1995.
Continuing the retrogression brings us to
ARGs
Gronda, gronda.
It's worth noting that some tabloid newspapers (particularly those skewing to readers of a certain age) still include scratchcards as part of their promotional activity.
I'm reasonably confident that you can take advantage of the uniform distribution of winning times and the presumed non-uniform distribution of entries by checking at a time of day when you suspect few checks will be made.
Ah, but is the distribution of winning times actually uniform? It would, for instance, be entirely sensible to shape the distribution of winning times against the anticipated distribution of entries. There will be an underlying Poisson distribution, but with λ varying according to the entry rate - naively, I would anticipate a small λ at lunchtime and early evening, a very large λ in the small hours. After a company has run just one of these promotions, they can use the data to calibrate their model further.
Has there been a legislation change to require all advertised prizes to be paid out, rather than to permit them to go unclaimed? Is it relevant that the same game was to be played both in the UK and in Ireland, thus had to be adaptable to both jurisdictions?
Both? You may mean all four: England and Wales, Scotland (which I understand to be broadly aligned with England), Northern Ireland (which is far more restrictive), and Ireland (similar to, but also different from, the north). In particular, the television gambling programmes that blight the wee small hours have to take great care in Northern Ireland, and at least one of them is blacked out in the six counties rather than attempt to comply with the legislative thicket.
After all, loyalty clubs (Nectar, Tesco Clubcard) and the like are nothing but updated versions of Green Shield Stamps.
On every transaction, players will supply a database index key for their purchasing data, in return for a 1% discount on future shopping. It seems that on some - but not every - visit, players at some supermarkets will also be issued with a token, entitling them to some larger discount against some product they might consider buying. For instance, someone who buys lots of pork sausages might get a coupon offering a steep discount against beef sausages. Are these analagous to scratchcards, without the bother of doing any scratching off, and only giving out the winning tickets?
Visual codes are discussed in comments. At this moment in time, I don't think the technology is sufficiently mature to appeal to the target market, which is as much grannies as it is young whippersnappers. 2d barcode recognition also remains in its infancy, and requires more luck than judgement to succeed. Self-service checkouts do nothing to lessen the concern - trying to get the reader to take notice of the tin of beans you're waving at it without the reader counting it twice is a Difficult Puzzle, so much so that I half-expect Ed Tudor-Pole to offer a time crystal to anyone who can achieve it without error.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-29 10:38 pm (UTC)Newspapers; good point.
is the distribution of winning times actually uniform?
What a good question! I've certainly made an assumption there. I don't know how you would check this in practice, and I don't know how the competition promoters would explain this on the packaging... if, indeed, they (would?) have to.
Four legislations: interesting. I'm certainly aware that the UK and Ireland have different legislations, by virtue of Irish entrants having to tick a box to identify themselves as such, and answer a skill-testing question to participate. (I'm curious to see an example of such, to compare them with their Quebec counterparts, but not sufficiently curious to the point of pretending to be Irish and forfeiting an entry.) This document has some guidance.
Loyalty card driven coupons: ahh, you may be onto something, though currently I only have anecdotes rather than data on this one.
Crikey, you've been making lots of good points!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-30 01:00 am (UTC)Merry Christmas to you, Meg and the cats.
Turbo
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-30 01:10 am (UTC)All the best to you and yours, too!