Do you remember the over excitable kids TV host Andi Peters from the 1990s?
If you’re not an early riser, you could be forgiven for thinking that he’s been placed in the Dusty Bin of the past with, err, Dusty Bin! But no, as us morning people know, he’s always popping up on ITV’s breakfast show Good Morning Britain hosting the GMB competition segments.
Win A Lot Of Cash
Typically, there are huge cash prizes on offer, sometimes in the six figure range, or alternatively something like thirty or forty grand backed up with a flash car or a dream holiday which is obviously a big draw and appealing to the viewers of the show.
Of course, ITV don’t make a big deal of the fact that there are probably hundreds of thousands of entries (possibly even millions of entries) for each competition, making the odds of winning rather small. Naturally, the TV shows make the premium rate phone lines and text entry numbers sounds really easy to use, and gloss over the cost in the fast speech of the terms and conditions. There’s even now a way to pay online to enter – a process that used to be free.
Did You Know You Can Enter ITV’s GMB Competitions For Free?
Generally prize draws do offer a free entry option, and ITV now use postal entry, probably because it’s the hardest for viewers to use – rather than just call or send a text to a number, or log onto the internet, they have to physically write their entry, address the envelope and pay for a stamp, not to mention walk to the post box to send it.
That’s a big reason why websites have popped up to promote the free entry options for the Good Morning Britain competition (and other shows too), so that people are more aware that they don’t have to spend two pound a pop to be just like the people Andi Peters shows off on those brief promotional slots to tempt people into being the next big winner.
Compared To The Lottery, Which Is Better?
Admittedly, it’s no worse than the lottery, in fact slightly better as you can enter for free unlike the various draws run by Camelot. The odds of hitting the jackpot on the lottery are also (likely) a lot lower than with ITV’s competitions, but on the other hand there’s usually only one GMB competition prize (sometimes there are a handful of much smaller £250 cash runner up prizes too). With the lottery, there are thousands of smaller winners, not just one big jackpot scooped per draw, and some of those are life changing amounts too.
To put it another way, if you get lucky with ITV, you’ll win big, but the average return on the lottery is probably better, not that we’ve crunched the numbers ourselves.
Andi Is The King Of Competitions!
So, next time you see Andi’s smiling face on GMB, remember that the odd entry is fun and a perfectly reasonable flutter, but routinely entering is quickly going to get expensive, so that’s going to be a wise time to start putting in the extra effort and using the free postal entry instead – you’ve got the same chance of winning, and the cost of a second class stamp is significantly lower – especially with multiple entries per competition!