Pepsi-iTunes Promo: 5 Million Songs

[Mudbug]

never saw 1 cap. not one.

I'd happily redeem the other 95 million that are floating around somewhere.

 

[johnnowak]

I STILL haven't even seen one of these bottled ANYWHERE in Greenwich Village. What the crap kind of promotion is this!?

 

[Flowbee]

I'm a Coke man, but I drank pepsi like crazy. I had over 50 caps and won nothing. I thought I heard it was 1 in 3 wins. Maybe it was like 1 in 100 wins so stead of 100 million wins, it was really 10 million. 5 mil out of 10 mil ain't bad.

You must have the worst luck east of the Mississippi. Either that, or there was someone at the store you were buying from who was using the 'tipping' trick to find the winners before you got there.

I bought 12 bottles, won 6 songs. Only a few stores in my area carried the iTMS bottles, though.

 

[Windowlicker]

do we have any statistics of other campaigns? I mean, is 5% really that little? I wouldn't think any other campaign would be more than 15% (MAX!!).. still, I would have thought abnout something around 10%..

 

[Rower_CPU]

I agree on the distribution problems. Southern California didn't see any bottles for what, a month into the promo? Big Gulp and Slurpee cups were around at 7-11s, but I doubt most people bothered cutting them to see if they won or not.

Besides, my winning percentage was something like 15% - nowhere near the 33% mark. What gives!?!?! 😉

 

[Lancetx]

I blame Pepsi:

• Lousy advertisements
• Lack of advertising
• Scant and ill-timed distribution

My thoughts exactly. Oh well, I never bought Pepsi before this promo and I won't be buying any more now that it's over either.

 

[wordmunger]

I have to say, the five percent doesn't surprise me. When I drink a Pepsi, I'm not in a position to download music. I might be out shopping, or in the park taking a walk. I'm not going to hang on to a winning bottle cap for a lousy single song.

It's the same thing with contests at McDonalds, etc. If I win a free order of fries, I tend just to throw it away--I'm at McDonalds, so I've just eaten, and even if I did manage to save it for next time, why would I cash in my free fries--generally the value meal costs the same as buying a big mac and a coke and getting the fries for free.

 

[Lancetx]

They were only estimating a 15-20% redemption rate initially anyway. However, that was before Pepsi bungled the distribution though. I guess we shouldn't be surprised.

 

[pgwalsh]

I think from from a marketing prospective 5% is pretty good. They usually only expect a 1% to 3% return on marketing campaigns.

You have to keep in mind that many people do not own a computer; many people do not know what iTunes is; many people are lazy and will never figure it out. When you start accounting for those people and how many people drink such and such softdrinks, your expectations will lower.

I'll check myself today.. I have a bunch of newphews and neices that drink soda, but I doubt they know what itunes is...

 

[Performfreak]

I ended up getting 30 free songs from it. I go to school at a college where Pepsi has exclusive rights to be the only soft drink sold. I think I might've bought a total of three bottles of Pepsi, the other 27 came from caps I found.

 

[Some_Big_Spoon]

Advertising.

This has been said, and will be said time and time again: Apple's advertising is appauling.

If they had bothered to show commercials more than once (superbowl), maybe do some print ads, radio ads, then they would have reached their goal. they chose not to do this. The same goes for their hardware and software. If they advertised, they'd sell and be in a better position.

Steve's view of Apple is that it's like an exclusive club: so cool that you on't have to advertise. People will just show up (buy) because it's so cool, even though they know nothing about it. That;s not a way to run a publicly traded company fighting the sperad of DRM and insecure systems (M$)

*cue newbies and Apple Store references, but i'm right.

 

[fluidinclusion]

Bottle availability sporadic - other thoughts

Well, 100 million isn't that many, so there are a lot of places to be distributed. I redeemed about 37 caps, assembled from myself and coworkers, but many stores here in Michigan (convenience stores) still have unsold bottles - they didn't show up right away). Still more perplexing is that our local Meijer Store (a huge store and a regional competitor to WalMart) did not have even ONE of these bottles, at least that I saw. I wonder if stores can opt in or out of promotional sodas, perhaps the price is different?

I would echo the sentiment about many people on Windows 98 (or mac os < or =9). They can't claim the codes, even if they wanted to. Everyone I work with, except three people, have Windows 98 or older and didn't know about the promotion. Of the others, one is a Mac OS X user, but wasn't interested in iTunes. Another has XP, but doesn't have an internet connection and also wasn't interested. The third has XP, but had no idea about the promotion.

To be honest, I expected 10-20 million to be redeemed, but 5 million (still a bit to go) isn't horrendous, considering that most people ignore ALL soft drink promotions. The only other promotion I ever paid attention to was the Pepsi name game in the 1980's (which won me $30).

Many people who are really into music either already bought CD's or got copies from friends. Die hard computer users that are really into music also are likely to have downloaded MP3's or Windows Media files (the kids in my neighborhood sure have). No one gets revenue from that (except maybe Kazaa advertisers).

At least Apple has 5 million more songs added to it's total. At worst, I'd give the 70% of their goal a "C" grade. Lots of competition and lack of awareness mean that this will take a while.

I'd really like to see the total numbers and some sales charts through time for all sites/services. Hopefully iTunes can stay on top.

Keep moving forward. (I just got a 12" Powerbook on Monday, by the way. My first Powerbook and my second Apple laptop (had a clamshell before). It sure is small. I like it a lot (Forrest Gump voice).

 

[Jiffy_526]

I think the pepsi idea works i get all sorts of free music

🙄

 

[Nny]

I redeemed 59 myself. Would have bought more, but supplies dried up late-February. Had a fun time explaining to my wife why I was buying 99 cent Diet Pepsi 20 oz. bottles six at a time when I could buy a 24 pack of 12 oz. cans for the same price.

 

[BobVB]

I'm a Coke man, but I drank pepsi like crazy. I had over 50 caps and won nothing. I thought I heard it was 1 in 3 wins. Maybe it was like 1 in 100 wins so stead of 100 million wins, it was really 10 million. 5 mil out of 10 mil ain't bad.

If I got the bottles at the major grocery stores I would get about 1:3 but if I got them at fast food or whatever they didn't have any at all.

Maybe the night time cashiers were using the cheat to take the winners out of circulation for themselves?

 

[tibor]

Your local landfill.

More like everyone who found out you could game the system. C'mon people, you never heard that you could just look under the cap to see which bottles were winners? STF - I read about it here.

No wonder some of you were zero for however many tries. Other people cleaned the shelves of the winners. I know it happened it my town.

-d

 

[Rower_CPU]

...
If they had bothered to show commercials more than once (superbowl)

They did. I saw the commercial several times on network TV, as recently as last week.

Agreed on the rest of Apple's marketing, though, but as others have said, Pepsi deserves equal if not more blame for not getting distribution going in time.

 

[LucasLand]

7-Eleven cups is the best way to win!

I found the best place to win was the 7-eleven cups. Most that I bought during my lunch breaks were winners. I also realized that it is real easy to slightly peel back lip of cup with your fingernail. If you see the word "please" it is a loser. If you see the word "winner" , use that cup. My local 7-11 still has tons of cups.

 

[pgwalsh]

I found the best place to win was the 7-eleven cups. Most that I bought during my lunch breaks were winners. I also realized that it is real easy to slightly peel back lip of cup with your fingernail. If you see the word "please" it is a loser. If you see the word "winner" , use that cup. My local 7-11 still has tons of cups.

Cheater!
😛

I never bought one... I'm not a softdrink fan.. .Now if they did it with beer or bottled water, then I might win.

 

[Dahl]

Did anyone see any bottles in the L.A. area? All I saw were the cups at 7-Eleven. I was 0-5 with those. 😛 Seems like it was more of a marketing flop on Pepsi's part. Weren't they also slow getting the bottles out to the areas that did get them?

Worst campaign ever ?

I never saw a single bottle and only found out late that 7-eleven were the place to get them.

 

[TWinbrook46636]

"Worst... Promo... Ever..."
- Comic Book Guy

 

[a_iver]

If they had bothered to show commercials more than once (superbowl), maybe do some print ads, radio ads, then they would have reached their goal. they chose not to do this. The same goes for their hardware and software. If they advertised, they'd sell and be in a better position.

Well. Kinda, sort of. Think of all the appearance they make in TV shows like Drew Carey, and in the background in commercials. The only problem is seeing them in the background doesn't make me want to buy one.

To me it kind of seems like Apple thinks they are more popular than they are. If they did have at least 30% computer users using macs it might make more sense. Also I did hear a few commercials on radio for iTunes as well as several iPod Giveaways.

But if they advertised on TV as much as Dell, well then holy crap that would be awesome. But then again, that is a lot of money for that kind of advertising.

 

[Jovian9]

No grocery stores carried these in my area.......only some convenience stores....and that took until the 3rd week of March to happen. I would have bought a lot more but it became too inconvenient to go to places I do not normally go just to find these pepsi bottles. Very lousy distribution.

 

[LaMerVipere]

I didn't see ANY here in Chicago! 🙁

And I was all ready to buy like truckloads of Pepsi too. (I'm a coke man though)

At least now I can go back to hating Pepsi. 🙂

Does anyone remember the lil Pepsi/Coke talk between the girl and her teacher from the movie "Election"? 😉

 

[JohnGillilan]

I did alright . . . 🙂

http://www-scf.usc.edu/~jgillila/