Competition with Character: when Trade Promotions Meet Licensing
Above: Arnott’s ran an on-pack promotion to win a trip to Bluey’s World.
Before Born Legal and Born Licensing, I spent the early part of my career at Warner Bros. Consumer Products doing the deals that put licensed characters onto Australian shelves. Looney Tunes on food products. Superman in the men's grooming aisle. Scooby-Doo on dog food. These were pretty standard licensing deals for FMCG products, which was the category I managed.
Occasionally, our licensees would want to do more. On top of using the IP on pack, they wanted to create more reasons for the consumer to put their product in their shopping trolley. One of those ways was by running a consumer promotion.
That's the moment where two separate disciplines suddenly become one project - and where most of the risk in this space actually sits.
Two disciplines, one pack
A standard trade promotion in Australia is already a regulated exercise. Depending on the states you're running in and whether the mechanic involves any element of chance, you may need to notify or seek authority from regulators like NSW Fair Trading, the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission, or Consumer and Business Services in South Australia. You need compliant terms and conditions, the right eligibility and exclusion clauses, and a prize structure that matches what you've actually cleared.
Layer entertainment IP on top - a superhero on the lunchbox snack, a movie villain on the cereal box, a franchise logo on the competition mechanic - and you've added an entirely separate discipline: licensing. Now someone needs to negotiate rights with the studio or rights holder, secure approval for how the character appears on pack, confirm the territory and duration the licence actually covers, and make sure the promotional mechanic itself doesn't stray outside what's been agreed (Born to License can help with this!).
On-pack IP promotions need both disciplines, trade promotions and licensing, coordinated tightly, and it's rare to find a single team confident across both sides.
Above: An example of a licensed consumer promotion I worked on with Schick around the 2013 Super man Man of Steel theatrical release.
Where it can go wrong
Here are some of the reasons why a trade promotion around a character or IP may not go as planned:
The licence term doesn't match the promotion term. A licence is agreed for a fixed window — often tied to a film's theatrical release or a specific on-shelf period. If the trade promotion is extended, gets a second print run, or the winner announcement drags past the notification deadlines regulators expect, the promotion can keep running after the underlying rights have technically lapsed.
Pack artwork ships before the rights holder signs off. Most licensors require approval of exactly how their IP appears - character likeness, colour treatment, positioning next to the brand logo, even the size of a trademark notice. Print deadlines are unforgiving, and I've seen artwork go to press on the assumption that approval was "basically done," only for a rights holder's brand team to flag an issue at the eleventh hour. This applies to any of the messaging around trade promotions too, as well as all marketing materials.
The mechanic wasn't cleared with the Licensor. A rights holder might approve use of a character's image on packaging but not approve a competition where consumers can win a trip connected to that IP, or use the character's likeness in social ads promoting the mechanic. The license and the promotional plan need to be checked against each other line by line, not assumed to cover the same ground.
Jurisdictional permit obligations get missed under the excitement of the creative. A national on-pack promotion tied to a major franchise moment naturally becomes the biggest priority in the building. That urgency is exactly when a state-specific permit application, or the ten-business-day notification window some regulators require before a promotion can commence, gets left until it's too late to fix cleanly.
What proper licensing looks like on shelf
You can usually tell when a brand has done this correctly, because the pack itself tells you. Any promotion that involves licensed IP will carry a line making clear that character names and devices are trademarks used under licence - a small piece of text doing a lot of legal work, confirming the rights holder's IP has been properly cleared for that specific use. It's a good instinct, when reviewing someone else's on-pack promotion, to look for that line. Its presence tells you the licensing conversation happened. Its absence should make you ask why - there is a chance you’re looking at a counterfeit product.
Above: The Arnott’s Bluey themed trade promotion
A recent example worth pointing to is Arnott's Bluey biscuit range, developed in partnership with BBC Studios. On the back of that license, Arnott's ran a purchase-based promotion offering shoppers the chance to win a family trip to Bluey's World, the newly opened attraction in Brisbane, with entry triggered by buying an Arnott's Bluey multipack from Coles or independent retailers. It's a clean illustration of the two disciplines working in step: a licensing agreement broad enough to support not just packaging but a promotional mechanic and a prize connected to the IP's own physical world, paired with a trade promotion built around a straightforward purchase-and-enter structure. The prize itself - a trip to a licensed attraction - only works commercially and legally because the license was structured to allow it from the outset.
A practical starting checklist
For any brand or agency considering an on-pack consumer promotion built around third-party IP:
Ensure that the license you’ve signed allows for activity like this before you even start - check relevent terms like territory, duration, permitted uses (packaging, advertising, social, competition mechanics), and whether extensions are possible.
Build in rights holder approval time, not as a courtesy step but as a hard dependency on your print and launch schedule.
Map your promotion mechanic to your permit obligations early, state by state, and treat the license negotiation and the permit application as two workstreams that need to land on the same day, not sequentially.
Align your promotion end date and prize fulfilment period to land within your license term, with buffer, so a delayed winner draw or an extended shelf life doesn't run past what's been cleared.
Check the pack copy for licensing attribution before it goes to print - if you're using someone else's IP, the trademark notice needs to be there, and it needs to say what the licence actually permits. Make sure the Licensor has approved all designs in writing or on their approvals platform.
This is precisely the gap Born Legal was built to close. Emma brings the trade promotions and advertising compliance expertise; from my licensing career I bring the rights holder relationships and the experience of sitting on both sides of a licensing negotiation. Between us, we look at an on-pack IP promotion the way it actually needs to be looked at - as one project with two sets of obligations, not two projects that happen to share a pack.
If you're planning a promotion that borrows someone else's characters or brand to sell your own, get in touch before you get started. It's a much easier conversation to have early.