Super Sweeps: McDonald’s Monopoly
Friday, August 9th, 2013
When you go into a fast food restaurant, sweepstakes probably aren’t the first thing on your mind. But back in 1987, McDonald’s saw the potential of the sweepstakes format as a way to boost trade and, working in partnership Hasbro, devised the McDonald’s Monopoly sweepstakes. Now running in over a dozen countries worldwide, the competition has become a popular yearly fixture of McDonald’s calendar with top prizes of $1 million in the US and £500,000 in the UK.
The idea is simple. When you purchase certain items from the McDonald’s menu, you receive a token corresponding to a piece on a Monopoly board. Just like in the board game version of Monopoly, the aim is to collect all of the properties of a particular colour. Doing so results in cash prizes. The higher the value of the properties collected, the higher the cash prize for getting them all – so to grab the top prize of £500,000 in the UK, you’d need to find both Park Lane (one of the most common tokens) and Mayfair (the rarest). There are also certain special tokens which entitle the winner to free items from the McDonald’s menu, but, of course, most people have their eyes on the cash prizes.
Unsurprisingly, however, McDonald’s don’t make it easy for people to win the big money. According to The Inquisitr, in the US edition of the sweepstake: “the chances of winning the $1 million grand prize are one in three billion.” The Inquisitr also explain that the odds of finding Boardwalk Avenue (the US equivalent of Mayfair) are “1 in 600 million” and that, although customers have a “1 in 10 chance of getting Baltic Avenue [equivalent to Whitechapel Road], they have just a 1 in 100,000 change of getting Mediterranean Avenue [Old Kent Road].”
So, next time you’re in a McDonald’s and you find what looks like a Monopoly card in your lunch, make sure you hang on to it. Otherwise, you could end up like 35-year-old PhD student, Richard Newman, who found the Mayfair token in his McDonald’s and, not knowing what it was, simply threw it away, only to realise two weeks later, when he found the Park Lane token in another meal, that his ignorance had cost him a life-changing £500,000.
The McDonald’s Monopoly sweepstake is a great example of how a competition can help boost trade for companies, but sweepstakes aren’t just a marketing tool. They’re also a great way to get your friend and co-workers competing with each other in a fun and exciting way. If you’re thinking about getting together a sweepstake at the office, or down the pub, why not let Panda Sweeps take the hassle out of organising it? It’s quick, easy and, best of all, free! Let Panda Sweeps take the sweat out of your sweepstakes.
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