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The Daily News Promotion that Refused to be won 8/31/2026 9:23:21 AM
The Promotion that Refused to Be Won!
8/26/20260 Comments
Before I became an author and long before social media, online competitions and digital marketing, newspapers had to find other ways to persuade people to buy an extra copy—or two or three.
Back in the late 1980s, when I was Marketing Manager of Perth’s afternoon newspaper, the Daily News, I came up with an idea for a circulation promotion based on Lotto. Instead of choosing numbers, readers would choose letters.
We called it BetaLetta.
The Daily News had a large horse-racing section, so I approached the TAB with the idea of sponsoring the promotion. There was something in it for both of us. We wanted to increase newspaper sales during an important circulation period. The TAB wanted to encourage people who might never normally enter one of their agencies to come inside.
At that time, many people—particularly women—regarded TAB agencies as places for serious punters and simply didn’t go into them. BetaLetta gave them a reason to cross the threshold and perhaps discover they weren’t quite as intimidating as they imagined.
The TAB agreed to come aboard. Fairplay Print, which produced their racing cards, printed special BetaLetta cards that looked just like the cards used by people betting on the horses and dogs. Their mathematicians worked out the odds, and their computer chose the winning combination each day.
Every copy of the Daily News contained a BetaLetta card. To enter, readers took their card to a TAB agency and selected seven letters from the alphabet. The prize began at $500. If nobody won, another $50 was added the following publishing day.
We hoped, of course, that the jackpot would grow. The bigger the prize, the more interest it generated, and because there was a card in every newspaper, people bought multiple copies to give themselves more chances of winning.
It worked. In fact, it worked rather too well. Nobody won.
The prize climbed and climbed. Each day, the TAB sent us the winning combination by computer, together with the number of entries received. Interest grew. Newspaper sales grew. And still nobody won. Eventually, the jackpot reached the rather alarming figure of $60,000.
By then, instead of hoping the prize would grow, we were desperately hoping somebody would take it off our hands. We certainly didn’t want to discover how high it might go if the winning drought continued.
So, we decided to make BetaLetta easier. Instead of choosing seven letters, entrants now had to choose six.
We ran a television advertisement announcing that BetaLetta must be won that week. We even arranged another incentive: a coupon in the newspaper entitled the purchaser to a free hamburger.
Surely that would do it.
It didn’t.
The prize still refused to go.
There was only one thing left to do. We reduced the required letters again—from six to five.
That certainly got everyone’s attention.
About 45,000 entries poured in.
And finally—finally!—BetaLetta was won. Not by one person, but by three, who shared the prize money between them. I was enormously relieved, and so were the owners.
Looking back nearly forty years later, what I remember most isn’t simply the success of BetaLetta, although it became the most successful promotion we ever ran at the Daily News. It’s how much freedom we had to dream up ideas, pick up a telephone, persuade other businesses to join us and then somehow make the whole thing happen.
There were no social-media likes, clicks or shares to count. We counted newspapers. And for a while, thanks to 26 letters of the alphabet and a jackpot that stubbornly refused to be won, we sold an awful lot of them.
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