Seabrook Crisps pulls rule-breaking Facebook competition
Seabrook Crisps has been forced to pull a Facebook competition after it breached the site's terms and conditions.
The competition launched yesterday and offered fans the chance to win a year's supply of crisps simply by changing their profile picture to the Seabrook logo for seven days.
But asking users to change their picture is against Facebook's rules on promotions and Seabrook has been forced to cancel the competition and apologise.
In a message posted on its Facebook page today, Seabrook said: "We have unfortunately had to close our competition to win a year’s supply of crisps due to an oversight of how the competition fits in with Facebook’s terms and conditions.
"Seabrook would like to apologise to everyone who entered and ask for you to revert your profile picture back to another image."
The crisp company's error was brought to light and savaged by blogger and prolific competition enterer 'SuperLuckyDi'.
She wrote on her Super Lucky blog: "As well as being unimaginative and lazy, this promotion violates Facebook Promotions Guidelines in a big way. It's not using an App and it requires people to change their profile photo.
"Think about it, the prize of a year's supply of crisps is probably costing Seabrook less than £50. And what are they getting for that? Hundreds of Facebook fans advertising them across Facebook for a whole week! It sounds clever, but it's preying on the gullibility of Facebook users."
The Drum contacted Seabrook and its PR agency Propaganda but no one had provided a comment at the time of writing.
Seabrook did however write on its Facebook page: "In looking for fresh competition ideas we are always willing to try something new but on this occasion we’ve made a mistake, we sincerely apologise to all of our fans for this."
Updated
Propaganda has today issued the following statement:
"With regards to the recent coverage of the Seabrook Crisps Facebook competition, Propaganda would like to state that Seabrook Crisps manage their social media updates via an in-house team and we had no involvement with the competition before it went onto Facebook. Propaganda identified the issue and advised our client accordingly - ensuring Facebook guidelines and social media best practice are adhered to.
"The support from the Seabrook Facebook community has been very positive and shows that an open and honest approach to the situation has been welcomed by the fans of the brand."