Being the hottest free agent signing in blogging history and the only contributor that won't end up the the last name of Czyzewicz, I figured it was time to post. I haven't picked a fight with a company in awhile but I would like to commend a promotion.
This is sort of like Cartmanland in that it's the greatest promotion you can't participate in. It ended two weeks ago. But I still feel it deserves some recognition. Hopefully there are Pepsi, MTV, Yahoo, or Harmonix employees scouring this site like Comcast does.
Basically Pepsi just finished a promotion with Rock Band that involved entering in codes from bottles for points that you could use for chances at various prizes. They included weekly raffles for entire systems, Rock Band store gift certificates, and game bundles. But the real value was the chance to instantly win a song token. This allowed you to download a song from a preset list.
Here are all the good things they did:
1. They teamed with Yahoo so I could just reuse an existing account.
B. The song tokens won. A lot. I think I ended up with 80/100 winning. That's insane. It also kept me buying more and valuing the caps as it was a high winning percentage. Most giveaways I end up doing for a week and then just call it off since I feel it's not worth the effort.
III. While the song catalog didn't include every song, the list was pretty extensive. AND, they didn't just make one list and stop. They made 2-3 big updates over the course of the promotion which added new songs that had been released since the last list came out. I was quite impressed and surprised to find this out. Props to them.
Four. If you chose the Wii as your system, they just gave you a code for $2 worth of Nintendo store credit. This was probably only due to the fact that Nintendo's online codes can only be redeemed for points and not specific items, but they still allowed this even after this "hack" was discovered. More props.
So good work all around, guys.
On the other hand, when I preordered Guitar Hero: Metallica, Activision gave me a free drum pedal (for the new double bass feature) which they made incompatible with the Rock Band drums. Sooo, thanks for that.
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Hey! A company doing something right. I like it. Maybe I'll have to reconsider my coke v pepsi choice unless you know of something cool that coke does...
ReplyDeleteThat is a surprisingly useful contest. Just thinking about that, I think I'd be even somewhat more likely to actually buy Rock Band after that. Interesting.
ReplyDeleteIn a related cap giveaway note, the bonus codes for Coke bottle caps in Germany do not correspond to the US ones. So while you're in Germany, you can't accumulat My Coke Reward points. My brother discovered that while visiting. Dumb.
Yes, but I do like the coke rewards program, if for no other reason, I can get some free bottles of coke after every 8, or a free powerade after every 4 powerades. I think that is type of stuff that some of these giveaways miss. Is it cool to win $1M? Yes, for that person. But the other 20M people who dont win that money get nothing. I think from Kevin's post it is clear, people just like to win stuff. Sometimes even useful stuff. If you give me a free bottle of coke everytime I buy 8, I am happy.
ReplyDeleteCoke stepped it up recently in realizing that Diet Coke is far worse than Diet Pepsi and made the much more comparable Coke Zero.
ReplyDeleteWith the addition of Coke Zero, my purchasing choice is generally whichever brand is on sale or whichever one is having a good promotion at the time. And kind of "forcing" vendors that use Coke fountain soda into making Zero available there too is another thing Coke's done recently to increase my approval rating.
I think the people like winning point is perfect. This is why I spent 98% of my points trying to get free songs instead of trying to win a bigger prize. I don't think it's a good value bet. So offers like "Chance at $1,000,000" means nothing to me because I feel I'll never win.