Walkers Crisps spent a fortune advertising their summer competition called Spell and Go, using Gary Lineker in the promotions.

The adverts claimed 20,000 holidays were to be won including trips to Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, Bangkok and lots more places. It all sounded great.

Simply buy a bag of Walkers and enter the 12 digit code on the bag into the Walkers website and it will give you a letter. You collect the letters until you have the destination name you want and you claim the holiday.

In case you cannot find all of the letters you want, there was a swap feature whereby you could swap a letter for another random one or swap with another person.

BUT, once the competition had got going, frustrated and angry people used social media to vent their feelings towards Walkers.

The problem was that all of the destinations contained one or more of the letters C,D and K and those just didn’t turn up. Nobody could find one and on the social media sites no-one could be found that had actually won one of the holidays. Eventually some people did claim to have won but it still seemed a virtual impossibility.

Figures provided by Walkers to the Advertising Standards Agency show that only 796 of the claimed 20,000 holidays were ever won.

Of the 12.8 million times people had entered a code on the website – just 98 letter Ks, 252 letter Ds and 278 letter Cs were given out.

PLUS, in the swap facility there were zero letter Ks, letter Ds and letter Cs – what a scam.

The Advertising Standards Authority received over a thousand complaint about the competition and ruled that because some of the valuable letters were released they couldn’t declare I the whole competition misleading but that the random swap feature was misleading and Walkers must do better in future.

Let’s hope that Walkers have learned their lesson and will not aggravate their customers with this kind of misleading Marketing in the future.

Do you have an opinion on this matter? Please comment in the box below.