Have you ever wondered if there really is a white creme egg with a £10,000 prize inside? Or if that pack of cereal giving away a car in a prize draw is the real deal? Jeremy Stern can confirm that they are, because he’s spent much of his life going undercover in stores nationwide to secretly place those golden ticket packs or winning code numbers in plain sight for lucky shoppers to find and win anything from a holiday to cash or gadgets.
Jeremy, 64, is CEO of PromoVeritas, a company that ensures that prize promotions operated by most of the UK’s major brands are run fairly, securely and in compliance with law and they literally give away £millions a year – just recently £100,000 in cash to the winner of a prize draw run by a computer games company. “We act as ‘promotional bodyguards’, protecting brand reputations and integrity. But our work also helps the public to trust prize promotions more, to feel that they have a fair chance of winning,” he explains.
Wearing a pin-hole camera, Jeremy was filmed dropping off special winning packs at stores for the annual Hunt the Cadbury Crème Egg promotion.
The real-life Willy Wonka takes his role very seriously, often visiting client factories at weekends, to organise the production of the winning packs when few staff are around, and as for those special golden tickets and unique codes, once they are printed, the artwork is deleted so it can’t be reprinted. “The Advertising Standard Authority oversees the marketing Industry and their rules say that for Willy Wonka-style instant wins there must be an independent statement to confirm that the stated number of prize packs have been distributed fairly and randomly. This is what we do, via a process called Controlled Prize Placement. Hiding winning packs into stores without anyone knowing”, he explains.
For one campaign the client wanted local winners, so Jeremy and his team arranged to visit every single one of 600 postcodes in the UK. “I personally travelled to the Shetland Islands and the Isle of Wight to do my drops. For another client we had to distribute winning packs in stores in Norway and the most efficient way was via a ferry that travelled from the south to the north, deep into the Arctic Circle. So I spent a week on the boat stopping off several times a day to run into the cute little towns along the way, do my drop and then get back to the boat and into a hot sauna, which was lovely,” he explains.
“Fairness is integral to our work. We always work out a route that covers the relevant territory, in a logical manner and linked to the sales of the brand. So, if Scotland accounts for 25% of the brand sales, then we ensure that Scotland will have 10 of the 40 prize packs placed there.
“Routes are mapped out and me or one of the team will start the distribution undercover. We will visit the target store, make sure it is selling the right pack size, then when no one is looking we place one of our winning packs on the shelves for a shopper to then buy and discover. To log our work, we take a photo of the store and record the time and date and send this to our head office because this helps to verify a winner’s claim.”
Placing the prizes is a relatively easy job if it’s a small chocolate bar or egg, but Jeremy and the team have done it with larger items, including a case of dog food and an 18-pack of Pepsi. Jeremy and his covert agents carry letters from the brand explaining their mission if they are somehow caught in the act.
The company also operates overseas – in over 80 countries last year. Jeremy says: “For Cornetto we ran a promotion in six European countries. There were 800 Vespa scooters to be won, so we created 800 fake plastic cones that looked and felt like the real thing, but were hollow inside, and each contained the key to one of the scooters.”
Jeremy then travelled to Naples, Italy, where the ice creams are made, and wearing an outfit similar to an astronaut suit, spent hours in a freezing cold warehouse, opening multipacks of Cornetto’s, taking one out and replacing it with one of his winning cones, then resealing the box and arranging for it to go to one of the six countries. “It was bitterly cold, but there was some compensation – what was to be done with the genuine Cornetto’s that I had taken out? I just had to eat a few.
“I absolutely love this job. We run hundreds of projects a year and there is a real thrill in walking down a supermarket aisle and seeing the wide range of promotions that we work for, knowing that we have influenced and helped many of the world’s biggest brands to run trusted, honest campaigns that can make a real difference for the lucky winners,” he adds