Most, but not all, ads for kids sweepstakes say "Many will enter, few will win" in small print or at the end of a TV commercial. Some contests give the exact odds in even smaller print, such as the odds of winning the basketball court in the Ritz Bits contest: 1 in 2.2 million. (Those odds are better than playing Powerball, where the chances are 1 in 3 million to win $100,000 and 1 in 120.5 million to win the grand jackpot; the chances of winning Powerball's $100 prize are far better: 1 in 12,249.)
Yet many online promotions leave the exact odds murky. Campbell's SouperStar Island contest, for example, says the "odds of winning a Grand Prize depend upon the number of eligible entries received."
It is these unclear and often insurmountable odds that make child psychiatrist Alvin A. Rosenfeld call sweepstakes cruel. Over the years, he said, he has seen children with low self esteem who consider themselves even bigger losers when they don't win the instant prize contained in a candy package. "You can see how crestfallen they are."
Rosenfeld is one of a few academics on the advertising industry's self-regulatory panel that oversees children's promotions. His preference, he said, would be to ban all sweepstakes for kids. The Children's Advertising Review Unit says it doesn't have such authority. But it has drawn up special rules for sweepstakes, noting that "care should be taken not to produce unrealistic expectations of the chances of winning or inflated expectations of the prize(s) to be won." Marketers must clearly depict the prizes, as well as disclose the odds of winning in language kids can understand.
Some nutritionists also complain that the sweepstakes are one more way food makers are encouraging the consumption of junk food, while privacy advocates worry that companies may misuse the personal information collected from the sweepstakes entries.
"One of the primary reasons for sweepstakes is information collection," said Chris Hoofnagle, director of the West Coast office of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Just like warranty cards, sweeps give marketers an opportunity to collect information and sell the list to others."
Companies using kids sweepstakes promotions say they do not sell any of the information they collect, although some say they may use some of it internally to learn more about the demographics of their customers, such as age, sex and geographic location.
All companies require parental approval for children under 13 before collecting such data. Usually, a mailed-in entry constitutes parental approval, while an online sign-up requires adult confirmation through a separate e-mail.
Unlike many sweepstakes designed for adults, kids do not get solicited by mail. Yet the contest offers are ubiquitous -- on a product's packaging, in TV, radio and magazine ads and all over the Internet.
Sweepstakes are a wonderful way to build brand loyalty, said Penny Schenk, vice president of promotions and entertainment marketing for WonderGroup, a youth-marketing firm in Ohio. That's especially true if a sweepstakes draws kids to a corporate Web site to play games or download screen savers, Schenk said. "You're getting to engage them one on one; you have their undivided, individual attention. As a marketer, it's better than a commercial which kids may or may not be watching, better than a magazine that kids may flip through." One client, she said, saw online traffic grow to 50,000 hits a month from 6,000 when it offered a sweepstakes.
Thomas J. Conlon, chairman of D.L. Blair, the nation's largest developer and operator of sweepstakes, said his company has not seen an overall increase in sweepstake offers, although he has seen more contests being offered on the Internet, a vehicle he called child-friendly.
The New England Confectionery Co. (more commonly known as NECCO), the maker of Sweethearts, is not known for big, national advertising campaigns. However, when it decided to advertise a new product in Nickelodeon magazine, Nickelodeon suggested a contest to send a kid's parents away for a weekend, said Lory Zimbalatti, NECCO's marketing manager. "What better thing would a kid like?" asked Zimbalatti. The product's introduction did well, she added, although she didn't attribute its success entirely to the sweepstakes.
Campbell's started offering sweepstakes three years ago as part of a campaign to reenergize sales of its chicken noodle soup. The soup wasn't registering with either parents or kids as favorably as hot dogs, pizza or macaroni and cheese, said John Faulkner, a company spokesman. "We needed to develop some more kid-friendly ads . . . . We wanted something totally out there, something nobody else could get anywhere else," that would appeal to both parents and kids, he said.
The first contest, in 2003, was a SouperStar fantasy, in which a girl and her family won a trip to a movie premiere with Mandy Moore. A boy won a trip to the Super Bowl with an NFL star. Campbell's reported more than 1 million visits to its contest Web site. Subsequent contests have increased Web site traffic even more, with more than 5 million visits for the current contest to a private island. The contest ends in mid-May.
Campbell's is pleased with the results, as chicken noodle soup sales have grown, Faulkner said. Perhaps even more significant, he added, company surveys have shown that kids have a more positive attitude about soup. As a result, the company is planning even more sweepstakes.
That's just fine with 9-year-old Amanda Roberts of Forest Hill, Md., who won the company's first contest to see Mandy Moore. She continues to enter all the new Campbell contests.
When she thinks of Campbell's, she said, soup isn't the first thing that comes to her mind. Rather, she said, "It's a good place to win prizes."
