All this week (commencing 17th June 2024), ITV’s live daytime shows – that’s GMB, Lorraine, This Morning and Loose Women – have been promoting the new £250,000 cash giveaway launched on GMB at the beginning of the week by Andi Peters.

There has been very little mention of bonus prizes this week – regular competition participants might recall that this time last year, there were bonus prizes of a Mini and Campervan up for grabs in the first couple of weeks of the competition.

If you’ve got sharp eyesight, you might have spotted a box on the entry details screen on the TV directing you to the terms and conditions this week, but it’s all quite complex in their legal terminology.

To our knowledge, it’s the first time that ITV have done things this way around, and there’s probably a few people that might feel a little disappointed that more wasn’t made of the bonus competitions that arrive next week between today, 21st June 2024 and next Friday, 28th June 2024 for paid entries, or the following Thursday, 4th July 2024 for free postal entries.

What Is The Bonus Competition?

When you enter during the second week of the competition, you’ll get an extra entry into the bonus competition as well as the main quarter of a million pound prize draw.

What Can You Win In The Bonus Competition?

There are prizes of £10,000 in cash for five lucky entrants.

Does It Cost More To Enter The Bonus Competition?

Entries are free into the bonus competition – you’ll get one free entry for each entry you lodge into the main draw in the second week of the competition.

When Can I Enter The Bonus Competition?

For paid entries – that’s phone, text and online entries, the second week’s entries are considered to be made from today (21st June 2024) until next Friday, 28th June 2024 at 4pm.

For free postal entries, you need to use the postal prefix of BONUS26 instead of CD25, and make sure your entry arrives before the post deadline of 4pm on July 4th 2024.

If your postal entry arrives after July 4th, 2024 but before the main competition for £250,000 closes at 4pm on 18th July 2024, with either the BONUS26 or CD25 prefix, you’ll still be entered into the main draw, but not the bonus competition.

Why Do ITV Run Bonus Competitions?

Bonus competition help ITV maintain momentum in attracting entries into their prize competitions.

As the draws are often open for several weeks, viewers are more likely to ignore them as time goes on, so extras get added to some promotions in order to boost the interest of the viewers.

The fact that this time around only the second week has been chosen to offer the bonus suggests that entry numbers might start to flag after the completion of the launch week, but later pick up as the sense of urgency arrives to get in the draw in the final week.

It’s a slightly risky strategy though, as some viewers might feel cheated if they’ve entered during the first week and wont get the same extra chance to win as someone joining in a week later.

As with previous years, This Morning competitions have managed to get a great exclusive with Saturday Night Takeaway for weekday viewers to join in with Ant and Dec’s fun.

For example, in 2023, they gave away Places on the Plane to lucky This Morning viewers alongside those from the weekend show.

This year, there’s no big finale in Florida with hundreds of viewers joining Ant and Dec in the sun, but there are hundreds of Takeaway Getaways up for grabs for inspirational people and competition winners.

While the main Saturday Night Takeaway competition prize is £100,000 cash and a Takeaway Getaway, This Morning are giving you the chance to win a Takeaway Getaway for four people!

This Week’s Competition

As a one off for this series of Saturday Night Takeaway, there is a prize of winning a Takeaway Getaway for four people. Find out more here:

How To Enter The Competition

All entries for this competition are free and via the ITV Win website.There’s no phone, text or postal entry option because the web entry is free.

To get into the draw, head over to the entry form here.

February 2024 sees a brand new competition launching on GMB And Lorraine, featuring a cash prize worth £84,000 for a lucky winner.

On Good Morning Britain, Andi Peters is presenting it as a new format for the show, which may be true for a competition that’s only running across GMB and Lorraine, but it’s actually not the first time a winner could choose to win a monthly cash prize or a single lump sum.

Back in September and October 2021, ITV ran a competition with what had the potential to be their biggest ever prize, with a total payout potentially totalling £1.2million.

The prize draw back then was marketed to viewers as ‘The Big Decision’ and involved a winner choosing whether to take a lump sum of £1million, or £10,000 a month for 10 years, a total of 120 £10,000 payments, or £1,200,000 in total.

The winner ultimately opted to take the million in one go, so didn’t actually beat the previous million pound winner a couple of years earlier.

This time around, the winner can choose to take £7,000 a month for a year (that’s 12 monthly instalments  of £7,000) or a single £84,000 lump sum. As both totals are the same, it would seem a little odd for anyone to take a monthly option, but who knows what the winner will choose to do?

Going back to The Big Decision in 2021, when the winner faced a choice of £10,000 a month for 10 years or a million pound lump, the decision was more nuanced.

Financial advisers interviewed on the competition segments were quick to point out how the interest would work on investing a million pound lump – paying off a mortgage would quickly produce savings on interest without incurring tax, but most savings investments would involve paying tax on interest.

On the other hand, taking the big lump might allow you to start enjoying your incredible windfall if you were the lucky winner, so the opportunity of the big lump would need to be considered against the extra £200,000 the winner could get over a decade of drip feeding the prize.

With the current prize in February 2024 though, the total prize is the same whichever option you take, so if I was to win, it would be the lump sum every time!

During the week of 26th May to 30th June 2023, This Morning are running another week of their new competition on the show, back for another week’s run.

The general idea is entrants have an opportunity to win up to £12,000 via a paid entry on the ITV Win website. A winner will be chosen from all the entries to play on the show at midday, and will initially win £6,000 just by being selected to play and answering the phone. The winner will then play a game to increase their win.

The increased prize involves selecting four boxes from 12 in total, with each selection able to win an additional £1,000 on top of the initial £6,000 – giving a maximum possible win of £10,000 in each game at midday, plus a chance to increase the total to £12,000 by answering a question. That’s a total possible prize of £12,000 each day – hence the name 12 at 12!

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Summer 2023 sees the latest big money ITV competition run through June and early July.. It’s similar in format to the half a million pound giveaway that happened back in late September and October last year, and also another quarter of a million pound giveaway back in February 2023.

This time, there’s £250,000 in cash up for grabs, so half the cash of October’s prize but there’s a twist compared to the normal competition format on ITV’s shows.

Let’s try to explain it as clearly as we can!

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For February 2023, ITV are running their first big cash prize competition of the year. It’s similar in format to the half a million pound giveaway that happened back in late September and October last year.

This time, there’s £250,000 in cash up for grabs, so half the cash of October’s prize but there’s a twist compared to the normal competition format on ITV’s shows.

Let’s try to explain it as clearly as we can!

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If you’ve watched more than a few minutes of ITV’s weekday breakfast news programme, Good Morning Britain, you’ll almost certainly have spotted a competition segment – probably with Andi Peters.

For years we’ve been familiar with the premium rate text codes and phone numbers, the paid online entry processed by PayPal, and the slightly more cumbersome (but much cheaper) postal entry that will cost you a stamp.

More recently, GMB competitions have featured a QR code as a quicker way to reach the competition entry form.

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ITV run a huge number of competitions each year, with their website showing at the time of writing (September 2022) that they’ve given away well over seven million pounds in cash in the last twelve months.

Winners are contacted by ITV in line with their competition terms and conditions, which usually means up to five weeks after the competition closes.

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It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a competition grab the attention of so many people quite like this ITV competition has done, since it launched on GMB back in May 2020. It’s grown into something that you even hear people talking about when you’re out and about, laughing about the surprise in a winner’s voice, or why so many people fail to answer the phone.

Free Cash Friday runs on Good Morning Britain between 8.15am and 9.00am on Fridays when the competition is run, and between 9.30am and 10.00am on Lorraine Kelly’s show.

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