ITV breached Ofcom competition rules over postal votes

Surely the odds of winning anything in these competitions are relatively long? People must know this and are happy to pay £2 or whatever it is to enter in the knowledge they almost certainly won't win (although the odds are better than the National Lottery). Presumably the call costs fund the prize pot (we know this definitely happened on the Quiz channels, since they'd suddenly decide to triple the cash on offer and not take any calls for 20 minutes, which was plain to see once they were introduced the "x callers in the last minute" straps and then have the audacity to sit there saying 'why is nobody calling? Come on people').

The Ofcom ruling is quite interesting at explaining how they run the competitions.

Every entry (postal and otherwise} is given a 19 digit positive or negative number, and the lowest number is assigned the winner. The problem occurred when an incorrect number of postal entries was manually copied from one spreadsheet to another; the auditors spotted one and then went back and checked and found five more.

ITV attempted to 'prove' that the missing entries wouldn't have won by subsequently allocating random numbers, none of which turned out to be lower than the winner for their competition, but that didn't fly with Ofcom as being a fair test.

I do on occasion enter competitions by post, but wouldn't go out of my way to buy a stamp for one if I didn't already have them lying around. (And I do occasionally consider entering the Gadget Show's competition then think of how much faff it would be to deal with it if I won, so don't bother.)

I've always wondered how they combine the different kinds of entries, that explains it.

I occasionally enter the Hits Radio Cash Register competition (handily the competition ends at 3pm and so the last link that says what the amount is on the school run) but only by entering on their web entry form. I've always thought my chances would be less because it's free entry

I agree about the Gadget Show competition, its looks tempting but where would I put it all?

eBay

I assumed from the news reports saying 1% of entrants were affected they meant only 1% used the free postal entry method, but from the OFCOM report they mean less than 1% of ITV competitions were affected (6 out of 712 competitions). I don't think they indicate how many entered the competitions concerned in total, only that just over 41k postal entries were affected.

My grandad wanted to enter a this morning competition a few months ago. I helped him through the stages on the website and his mobile phone provider wasn’t eligible to enter.

If I'd won The Gadget Show competition, I'd probably keep a few items, give some as presents then flog the rest.

Yes, but in the meantime? Sorry kids we can't see the new TV because there's another 4 in the way

Ironically I would say ITV Play was one of the 'fairer' call to lose channels back in the day!

I continually got through to the studio using the free web entry, won around £20,000 over several months and the shows had some actual effort put into them unlike the competitors who just had a puzzle that Einstein would struggle to solve on screen for months