Luxury home competition couple breached rules

THE under-fire couple who controversially pulled their £3m luxury Ringwood home as top prize in a raffle, and instead paid out just £110,000 in cash, did breach advertising rules.

However, Martin and Sharon Beresford (pictured) will not face punishment over their Win a Mega Home competition, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has decided.

The ASA blasted the couple for causing entrants “unnecessary disappointment” because their “misleading” adverts did not state an alternative cash prize was a possibility.

The couple set up the prize draw last year after failing to sell their contemporary Huf Haus at Avon Castle, offering the property as the sole prize to entrants who paid £25 and answered a question to be eligible.

They needed to sell 120,000 tickets for it to go ahead, but despite national publicity, the entry date being extended to the new year and the couple throwing in a £120,000 Aston Martin supercar as second prize, they sold fewer than 30,000 tickets.

Instead they offered a percentage of the sales – put at £110,070 – and enlisted a random number selector computer at Sterling Lottery Management, approved and audited by the Gambling Commission, to select 100 of the tickets at random.

From those, Christchurch MP Sir Christopher Chope drew the winner.

But that caused an outcry from disappointed punters, who said they had been misled, and the ASA revealed it subsequently received 18 complaints.

The grievances related mainly to a Tweet posted by the competition and two radio adverts close to the closing date that referred to a “dream home” being up for grabs.

In its ruling the ASA noted the Beresfords advertised the car only as an extra incentive for ticket sales and they had never offered the cash prize as an alternative top prize to the house but as a completely different one if the ticket threshold was not met.

The ASA said that of the £737,000 raised through ticket sales, the couple retained 25%, or £184,250, and £442,680 was spent on the contest, leaving the cash prize.

It said there had been an “exponential growth” of ticket sales in the run-up to the competition deadline and it was “not unreasonable” for promotion right up until that date.

“However, we were concerned that their ability to award the house was dependent on ticket sales, which meant there was a significant risk that they would not be able to award the prize as advertised,” the ASA added.

“It was a requirement of the Non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing code (known as the CAP code) that promoters must award the prizes as described in their ads or reasonable equivalents.

“We considered that any promoter that needed to generate sufficient revenue from the competition to fund the advertised prizes was likely to breach the code if they failed to sell the requisite number of tickets. Win a Mega Home had fallen significantly short of their sales target.

“The cash prize of £110,070 was clearly not a reasonable equivalent to a £3m house. We understood that only one winner had been identified, and that no prize (whether an Aston Martin, a reasonable equivalent or otherwise) was awarded to a runner-up.”

It noted the threshold of needing to sell 170,000 tickets was stated in the terms and conditions but it was “concerned” ticket buyers would not have known what the alternate prize was when buying their ticket.

The ASA concluded: “For those reasons we considered that the ads were misleading, that the promotion had not been administered fairly and that it was likely to have caused participants unnecessary disappointment.

“We told Win a Mega Home to ensure in future that they awarded the prizes as described in their ads or reasonable equivalents.”