ITV breached Ofcom competition rules over postal votes

cinders59

one word, Disgusting 

cinders59

I won twice with the free online entry £2700 and £17,777 but nothing since with the postal now I know why

mjm3346

cinders59 said:

I won twice with the free online entry £2700 and £17,777 but nothing since with the postal now I know why

Hardly, given that this only made a difference to a handful of competitions over 4 years - so over 99% of your entries that were received correctly were in play -  I would also hope that you were not making as many postal entries as we used to be able to do when it was free web entry (I won with web but not postal as I don't do postal)

cinders59

No usually 1 entry, sometimes 2 or maybe 3 for the £100k or with a car etc

robertjmca

From their website, ..... (trying to find a route to contact them to suggest reinstating free web entry) 

how we pick our winners Obsessed with online? Terrific texter? Lover of landlines? Or prefer post? You can count on us to count them all - every valid successful entry, free or paid, will be included when picking a winner. And if we pick you, we’ll give you a bell on the number you provided. Phones at the ready!

Yeah right !!

Taking the 41,000 entries that were ...... err .... mistakenly NOT added to the spreadsheet....... JUST HOW do you miss 41,000 postcards ??????  They would fill a average semi detached house !!!   ( I realise that stamps were slightly cheaper then) but if you take 41,000 2nd class stamps at today's prices ... that's over £26,600 ..... how much are they giving to charity as a sop to their conscience ?? 

If anyone has a contact for their competition team would you please post it.... I feel the need to vent my spleen :-)

Good luck everyone.... & if it's not too early.. a merry Christmas to you, your partners, family & friends.... Oh... & a MUCH better year next year !

mjm3346

The person in charge of competitions is noted on the chat thread, there wasn't a pile of 41,000 postcards, ITV have nothing to gain by leaving the entries out, make no money from postal entries, compared to free Web entry postal entry costs them more to administer but almost certainly increases the number number of people who pay to enter (people who switched to pay instead of switching to postal and didn't want to stop entering) and any one postcard if included probably had odds of well over 1,000,000 to 1

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6222528/itv-breached-ofcom-competition-rules-over-postal-votes/p1

Price of stamps is irrelevant as it is deemed officially as "Free Entry"

To flip it assuming someone entered all the competitions over the 4 year period then over 99 out of every 100 postal entries were entered.

Bridger12

Itv competition email is;
itvihelp@itv.com

lizd31

I received a reply to my email from the other day. I do actually believe that the press have probably made it sound a lot worse than it actually is, I know from experience as the Daily Mail once wrote an article about me in their paper which I never gave them permission to write & they just made things up themselves & contacted my local paper to get photos from them, again which I never gave permission to do. I was absolutely furious as I got awful comments about it from trolls & it ended up being published in papers all over the world. Ieven had someone set up fake MSE accounts in my name sending awful messages to other members & a fake facebook account with stolen photos of me. I read a book shortly after by Sharon Morgan who does the soap reviews for ITV, she used to be a journalist & she wrote that if they spoke to someone & they said yes to an article they would write 1000 words, if they just refused & said no they would just make it all up & write a 500 word article anyway so never trust what the papers say!

Dear Liz,

Thank you for your emails addressed to our CEO Carolyn McCall, which have been passed to me for response.

The integrity of all viewer competitions run by ITV is an absolute priority for us, any error is taken very seriously, and we are sincerely very sorry for these errors. As soon as we became aware of an issue with a small number of our competitions (i.e. 6 competitions out of more than 700 that we ran in the relevant period), we reported this to our regulator Ofcom.

As there has been some slightly confusing coverage in the press, we would like to emphasize the scale and nature of this particular issue. Ofcom acknowledged that unintentional human errors had affected some (not all) free postal entries in only a relatively small number of competitions, and that ITV acted proactively in addressing the matter, and in taking actions to avoid a recurrence.

These errors occurred between 2016-2019 and we no longer have details of all the affected entrants. We have therefore decided to make a donation to charity, broadly equivalent to the costs incurred by those affected entrants in posting these entries to us. We would assure you that in the vast majority of our competitions, all entries by whatever route were treated equally, all had an equal chance of winning, and winners are selected from all of our entry methods, including free entry via post.

We of course appreciate that some viewers were angry to learn that a small number of free postal entries were not included in a small number of competitions, albeit entirely accidentally and not intentionally, and we repeat our unreserved apology for these errors. However, in the context of the fair running of the overwhelming majority of our competitions, we do not consider that it is appropriate or necessary to offer refunds to all competition entrants or to all postal entrants.

Kind regards,

Sue Richardson
ITV Customer & Viewer Services

cinders59

lizd31 said:

I received a reply to my email from the other day. I do actually believe that the press have probably made it sound a lot worse than it actually is, I know from experience as the Daily Mail once wrote an article about me in their paper which I never gave them permission to write & they just made things up themselves & contacted my local paper to get photos from them, again which I never gave permission to do. I was absolutely furious as I got awful comments about it from trolls & it ended up being published in papers all over the world. Ieven had someone set up fake MSE accounts in my name sending awful messages to other members & a fake facebook account with stolen photos of me. I read a book shortly after by Sharon Morgan who does the soap reviews for ITV, she used to be a journalist & she wrote that if they spoke to someone & they said yes to an article they would write 1000 words, if they just refused & said no they would just make it all up & write a 500 word article anyway so never trust what the papers say!

Dear Liz,

Thank you for your emails addressed to our CEO Carolyn McCall, which have been passed to me for response.

The integrity of all viewer competitions run by ITV is an absolute priority for us, any error is taken very seriously, and we are sincerely very sorry for these errors. As soon as we became aware of an issue with a small number of our competitions (i.e. 6 competitions out of more than 700 that we ran in the relevant period), we reported this to our regulator Ofcom.

As there has been some slightly confusing coverage in the press, we would like to emphasize the scale and nature of this particular issue. Ofcom acknowledged that unintentional human errors had affected some (not all) free postal entries in only a relatively small number of competitions, and that ITV acted proactively in addressing the matter, and in taking actions to avoid a recurrence.

These errors occurred between 2016-2019 and we no longer have details of all the affected entrants. We have therefore decided to make a donation to charity, broadly equivalent to the costs incurred by those affected entrants in posting these entries to us. We would assure you that in the vast majority of our competitions, all entries by whatever route were treated equally, all had an equal chance of winning, and winners are selected from all of our entry methods, including free entry via post.

We of course appreciate that some viewers were angry to learn that a small number of free postal entries were not included in a small number of competitions, albeit entirely accidentally and not intentionally, and we repeat our unreserved apology for these errors. However, in the context of the fair running of the overwhelming majority of our competitions, we do not consider that it is appropriate or necessary to offer refunds to all competition entrants or to all postal entrants.

Kind regards,

Sue Richardson
ITV Customer & Viewer Services

Thanks Liz, I had exactly the same reply 

moneyexpertno2

How do they know that only 6 out of 700 postal competition entries were affected, if as Sue Richardson (from ITV Customer and Viewer Services) wrote, 'We no longer have details of the affected entrants'.  How did the error come to light?
I feel cheated as I have been entering tv postal competitions since 2015, and know many people who enter by post rather than the paid online and phone entries.
I would be very interested to find out how many winners between 2016-9, were postal entries.