Sold Out — 24 Hours Early
How a family-run competition business sold 65% of its tickets in the final six days
2,000 / 2,000 TICKETS SOLD
ProudLocks Competitions · 2014 Ford Fiesta ST180 · Drawn live 18th July 2026
Tickets sold, one day before the draw
Of all tickets sold in the final six days
Average cost per landing page view
Click-through rate on the lead creative
Where we started
Six days before the draw, the numbers told an uncomfortable story. 691 of 2,000 tickets sold — roughly a third — after five weeks on sale. The daily run rate was around 22 tickets. Selling the remaining 1,309 tickets meant finding roughly 200 sales a day. Ten times the run rate, in six days, on a modest budget.
Here's how it happened.
1. Protect the winner, cut the passengers
One video ad was doing all the work — the cheapest clicks, the strongest click-through rate, healthy frequency. Another was quietly draining budget. We paused the underperformer immediately and left the winning ad completely untouched: no copy edits, no creative swaps. Editing a proven ad resets its optimisation and wipes its social proof. The best thing you can do with a winner is leave it alone and feed it.
2. Scale budget in stages, not spikes
Budget went up in planned steps through the final week, with the heaviest spend reserved for the last 72 hours — when deadline urgency does the selling for you. Cost per landing page view held between £0.15 and £0.16 throughout the scale-up.
3. The two-strike rule on ad rejections
A new urgency creative was rejected by Meta's automated review on a false-positive intellectual property flag. House rule: two attempts per creative, then pivot. A rebuilt version went through clean and delivered over 1,000 landing page views in the final days. Don't fight review systems on a deadline — have a fallback ready and keep the approved workhorse running.
4. Ride the cultural moment
Mid-week, England played a World Cup semi-final. A 50%-off flash promotion — code ENGLAND, valid until midnight on match day — went out with football-themed creative built the same morning. It detonated, taking the competition from around a third sold to over 90% in days. Flash discounts work hardest when they're tied to a moment people already care about.
5. Let scarcity finish the job
With fewer than 150 tickets left, one final email went out built around a single image: a live progress bar reading 1,860 / 2,000 SOLD — 93%, with the car alongside it. No discount. No gimmick. Just the truth, visualised. The last tickets went before the deadline did.
6. Every channel, one message
Every ad, email and organic post that week carried the same date, deadline, price and live-draw promise. The three-email cadence ran alongside the ad scale-up and daily countdown content. None of it worked alone; all of it worked together.
The Creative That Carried The Final Week
Feed cut · 1:1
Stories cut · 9:16
The final-week creative: feed and Stories cuts, built from the client's own footage with compliance-clean urgency messaging.
The Email That Sold The Last Tickets
93% sold, visualised. Sent with fewer than 150 tickets remaining — the competition sold out before the deadline.
Sell-through problems in the final week are rarely creative problems — they're urgency problems. Structure the final week so every channel makes the deadline impossible to ignore, protect the ads that are already working, and when a cultural moment lands in your lap, move the same day.