A competition on Newstalk breakfast has has a complaint upheld against it for the way it was run.
One listener complained to the BAI that a winner was chosen after the advertised cut-off point for a competition which ran Monday to Friday in February 2014.
A winner was announced each day, the first one on a Tuesday after a task was set on a Monday. This continued to Friday when the on-air presenter said “Friday’s winner will be announced on Monday”.
Due to the nature of the competition, which involved uploading a public piece of audio to an app, the complainant noticed the time stamp on the eventual winning submission was on the Saturday. The complainant said this was unfair and feels this competition was run “very badly, was misleading, not transparent and unfair”.
The complainant contacted the Communicorp station to ask for the closing date and time for entries for Friday’s competition and for the terms and conditions. He receive a reply that there were no terms and condition listed. The complainant states that to run a competition open to the nation, there must be terms and conditions.
Newstalk did not supply a response within the agreed timeframe to the BAI. However, after several requests, a reply was submitted as follows: “Newstalk apologised for the delay in responding. Newstalk puts this down to the fact that the staff member with responsibility for this competition no longer works for the broadcaster and this has delayed their follow-up to the BAI on this complaint.”
In reviewing the complaint, the Committee noted with concern the failure of the broadcaster to initially respond to the BAI on foot of the complaint. The Committee regards this failure as unacceptable and this matter will now be raised with the broadcaster.
The complaint was upheld.