Every so often the ugly rumour surfaces that competitions are fixed (not just the ITV comps, it happens all over the place – we’ve even been asked if the lottery is rigged!).
One of the big problems is that the internet lend itself well to something called clickbait – you’ll see a lot of it at the bottom of articles on less reputable websites, and even on tabloid newspaper sites too.
The reason it’s rampant on the web is that everyone’s fighting for your attention, and we’re all drawn (by definition) to clickbait style headlines. Usually they’ll be shocking, or make outlandish claims in the headlines, but when you actually read the story, it’s far less incredible than it’s made to sound.
The reason it’s rampant on the web is that everyone’s fighting for your attention, and we’re all drawn (by definition) to clickbait style headlines. Usually they’ll be shocking, or make outlandish claims in the headlines, but when you actually read the story, it’s far less incredible than it’s made to sound.
That’s exactly how these rumours tend to get fuelled. To be clear – we’re not talking about pages like this, we’re talking about other websites linking to pages like this. That would typically happen if we paid another website to link to us, and the advert said something like ‘Have you heard all ITV Winners Are Actors? Learn the Truth!’. Of course, when you get here, just as you’re reading now, we don’t think there’s any truth in the rumours at all, in fact we’re pretty confident it’s all complete nonsense.
Going back ten years or so, there was a big problem with TV competitions and people entering them without a fair chance of winning, and that did cause a huge fallout. It wasn’t down to the competition itself as such, more down to the pressure of trying to get winners announced before the shows went off air, and allegations were made about winners being chosen before the announced competition close time.
As a result the credibility of competition on TV got damaged and took some time to bounce back. ITV will know this all to well, and as it’s almost certainly a sizeable income stream for them as a company, you can bet they wouldn’t want to risk a repeat of that.
It’s also why winners are usually announced quite some time after the lines initially close – it’s usually almost a week afterwards that the postal entries close, and then a further week to choose a winner. That allows them time to follow strict procedures to make sure everything is fair and square and all entries are treated equally.
Using actors as winners would only really make sense if there weren’t actually any winners. That clearly would be ridiculous to try to get away with on the part of ITV, so the faces you see time and again chatting with Andi Peters and Alison Hammond are almost certainly genuine winners, and they even talk about the prize they won. Surely by now someone would have blown the whistle with an ever growing number of competitions being run if something was amiss.
When you put all of that together and ask yourself is ITV winners are actors, the answer? Definitely not.