Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall

Each of those forms goes to a sales call list. And when you give up, you’ve already completed half a dozen forms - and you’ve given all that data for free.

If somebody does ever complete all of the forms, they get told the laptop is now out of stock - but here’s a free £50 voucher for Amazon.

In this semi-fictional example if you get the answer right then you could get to win a bicycle shaped object that looks like one of the bicycles ridden by one of the top teams.

You might not be telemarketed to death in this instance but the text you send will be to one of those premium rate numbers, to cost you £3 or so.

This money then goes to pay for the show, if you get 10000 people to text in then that is real money, enough to pay for the interns and rent the camera gear.

But it was not always like this. There was a time when the answers were difficult. There was also a time when nobody knew what a search engine was because they had not been invented yet. There was also a time when knowledge might only exist in people's heads rather than only online. Questions for TV shows could be difficult and the only way to enter might have been on a postcard where you might also have to enter a 'tie breaker', e.g. 'bicycles are best because...' (complete in less than ten words).

The tie breaker might not be there to just pick a winner from those that got the question right, the show might honestly be looking for a slogan and crowdsourcing it was a good way to pick more brains than just the production crew.

Furthermore, the result or answer was something of interest to the viewers. You could learn something. General knowledge was a thing back then, not denigrated to 'trivia' or something you could get by using your favourite search engine. General knowledge had value beyond the pub quiz.

In these former times, before 'Who wants to be a millionaire', it would have been an insult to the audience to ask a noddy multiple choice question for a competition.

Answering would not have been totally beyond the realms of possibility, you might have to go to the local library, dig out Encyclopaedia Britannica and get the answer from there. Or, if you knew your subject, then it might be something you knew. So winning also meant that you did get 'respect' from your peers and 'the world at large' for being clever enough to know the answer. Winning might have been more valuable than the prize itself just for the kudos. It wasn't as if some computer just selected your name at random in some lottery of other mugs willing to gamble.

The funny thing though is how these things go full circle. The TV shows that made the competition into something patronising and lame no longer get viewers, or even interns. That intern can make more success for themselves being a Youtube influencer and doing it all themselves. Rather than make the tea and do the errands for the big fat producer they can do their own script, presentation, camera-work and sound. they can also do their own competitions. And, in their competitions they can give away some respectable loot and get some genuine feedback from their fans. They can also avoid having to fleece their fans of an SMS premium rate call, a like/subscribe/thumbs-up and comment will be needed though. Even the question can be non-Google-able, fans might know from watching the show what breed of dog their co-presenter owns, so that could be a good quiz question. There need not be any bait-and-switch and the car given away really can be an actual car that actually gets given away.

The way she explained it was (mostly her words), way less than 1% of people are dumb enough to dial the number, but of the people who do call, 100% of them are people who are dumb enough to call.

In other words, if the signs appeared more credible, they would be much less effective, because they'd end up wasting a lot of time screening the calls of people who are unlikely to accept the terms they offer.

She also said that scaling up (and going up market) would increase their likelihood of litigation.

It seems to me like that's what's happening with these timeshare seminars. The car isn't just there to mislead people about the potential upside of the contest, the car is really there to screen the marketing process for gullible people attracted to large financed purchases.