Legal Administration & Compliance
Depending on the size and approximate retail value (ARV) of your promotion, certain steps must be put into place to ensure that both your brand and your winners stay legally compliant.
Bonding & Registration – For promotions where the total ARV of the prizes is above $5,000, bonding & registration is necessary in New York, Florida, and Rhode Island if your brand plans to allow residents of those states eligibility to win. Each state, while similar in regulation, have slightly different processes and timelines for the bonding & registration process. Realtime Media follows industry-wide best practices in ensuring that all promotions, where necessary, are bonded and registered well ahead of state-by-state deadlines.
1099 Tax Forms & Prize Reporting – For individual prizes with an ARV greater than $600. Whenever the sum of a single winner’s prize(s) is valued at over $600, that prize and its value must be reported to the IRS in order to make sure that it is claimed as a taxable item. While not necessarily a long process, the process of filing requisite tax forms can easily become tedious as prize pools get larger and the list of winners gets longer.
Alternate (Free) Means of Entry (AMOE) – If your promotion requires a purchase as a means of entry (receipt validation, in-pack promo code, etc.), an alternate (free) means of entry (AMOE) must be offered in order to remain legally compliant. Realtime Media offers support for mail based AMOE and will handle the P.O. Box set-up as well as the storage and manual entry of mail-in entries.
Insurance & Indemnification – Protect your prizes. Realtime Media offers insurance and indemnification that covers up to $1 Million under our Errors & Omissions Indemnification Policy.
Handling the obligations of a prize fulfillment can be daunting, however our in-house legal team offers the expertise necessary to ensure your official rules, prizing parameters and promotion are up-to-par with state, national, and international guidelines.
