Rocking out with Pepsi

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.