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i'm sure some brilliant person out there can figure out the algorithm for generating these codes. I mean, there are millions of un-redeemed songs that's waiting for all of us to download!
 
that promotion was pure [bleep]!!! distribution was certainly a problem, but the lack of advertising was horrible. so bad that i can barely remember the stupid commercial they had at the superbowl (that was during the superbowl wasn't it?).

secondly, like many others have said, i never even saw a promotional pepsi bottle anywhere, except for the cups from 7-11 and out of the 20 or so i bought, i only got 2 winners :(
 
5 million isn't good.
We can only hope some are holding out until the 29th or the 30th to redeem all their free tracks.

I won 13 out of 18 bottles which isn't too bad.

We had bottles a few days before the SB even started.

Maybe if Pepsi would have ran the commerical some more or if maybe they have some instore promo's...


Either way iTMS should hit 100 mil. by mid July at the rate of 2.7 mil. a week.
But it could be sooner if iTMS Europe goes online in June.
 
Not in LA

ALoLA said:
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. :p 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?
Not in Los Angeles. I am a regular Diet pepsi buyer and i but a ton each week. I have YET to see any iTunes bottles. I finaly saw some 16 ounce bottles from a vending machine. But they never made it to any grocery store chains.
I called the reginal pepsi distributors, and they blamed it on the now over grocery store strike and lack of demand. yet I noticed last night we have the Skrek 2 bottles, and that promo stars April 30th. Go figure.
 
I live in a rural area of Arizona and we had plenty of bottles with the iTunes caps. I was surprised to hear people in metropolitan areas couldn’t find them. They were very popular in my office (our network is all Mac). I didn’t think Pepsi did a very good job of advertising the promotion, probably because they had distribution problems. :(
 
Some_Big_Spoon said:
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.

Just as a reality check (and please note, I'm not a newbie), this had nothing to do with Apple's advertising. This was a Pepsi promotion. That was made clear from the beginning. While this was a deal between Apple and Pepsi, Pepsi was the one responsible for advertising the promotion. Pepsi was the one responsible for distributing the bottles (or is there some way that you want to blame that on Apple, too?).

Yes, this promotion was a flop, but the flop wasn't Apple's fault. They upheld their end of the bargain.
 
Hardly a failure

A failure? Hardly. Not as huge as it could have been, but still a good thing.

It was lots of good exposure for Apple, and certainly drew some people immediately--plus lots more down the road as part of mindshare-building.

I too thought it would do better--until I realized it was only on single bottles. I buy packs, and save more than .33 per bottle in doing so--so although I expected to redeem many caps, I redeemed NONE. (I prefer Coke, but boycott them for their pollution in India.)

Pepsi's choices are what determined the outcome, not Apple--and Pepsi may or may not have made money on the deal. But Apple surely did--they got paid for the music AND got the publicity! Including TV advertising they didn't pay a dime for.
 
Reno

While I can't speak for the whole time the promotion was on, the yellow-topped bottles were seen in only a few stores and one of the major supermarkets got them in during the last week of March in the Reno area... not very good on Pepsi's part and odd given that this was planned for months.
 
As of right now I've redeemed 195 songs....yes 195, that's not a typo. I'd say close to 130 were found/given to me. I would raid the recycling bins at college and got several caps. Two Pepsioholics gave me all of their caps that they had won. The rest of them I bought. My area had really good distribution of caps.
 
I never saw any promo bottles here in Houston. Not to say that they didn't exist, but I'm at two large grocery stores each once a week anyway and I've been looking for months. Terrible, terrible job by Pepsi.
 
Wonder what Pepsi thinks

From Pepsi's perspective...they received a ton of press, sold some sugar water to people who normally purchase competitor products, and only had to pay Apple for 5% of the total downloads they were giving away.

I suspect they are reasonably happy with the results.

Had no problem getting the bottles in Phoenix and only purchased one prior to learning about the tipping. I think I ended up with 12 free songs.

Speaking of which...Ben and Jerry's is giving away 50,000 free songs to those who take an Oath to Vote in the upcoming US Presidential Election. My wife and I will be dld'ing our freebies tonight. :)
 
Sorry if someone else already said this, I only read the first page of replies

but isn't it kind of funny that the redemption rate was almost identical to the commonly used market share for apple computers ? not funny haha, just...interesting
 
The distribution of the Pepsis was unfortunate. I was lucky, though -- I bought approximately 20 bottles and won 8 free songs.
 
So Cal. Vs. No Cal

DreaminDirector said:
I drink Pepsi anyway and I was ready to buy more than usual, however I only found a few places that had them. Oddly enough, one was a Target.

P.S. - out of like 10 caps, I won once.

The caps appeared in Santa Cruz about a month ago whereas the Pepsi bottles started appearing at my local markets (I live in Los Angeles) about a week and a half ago. So Cal definitely got the short end of the stick but the bottles did make it here.

The greatest thing about this whole promotion was that you could actually see which bottles were winners before you opened the bottle (so I never lost). My g-friend (who lives in Santa Cruz) works at a coffee shop where she could take as many Pepsi bottles as she wanted and so together we got about 40-50 free songs. She also would ask people for their caps if they weren't going to use 'em.
 
tibor said:
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

Well, not as many people were doing this as you seem to think. With only 5% of the winning caps redeemed, it's pretty clear that most people who got a winner either didn't know what to do with it or didn't care.
 
Promotion was a success!

  1. This was Pepsi's promo, not Apple's. Apple has nothing to do with it besides the itunes part.
  2. From a successful ad view, Pepsi got a ton of press and probably sold an extra 10 million bottles. Sounds like they made out quite well.
  3. I redeemed the 200 max limit. Some bought, most came from the office trash. Not as gross as you think. My co-workers put all Pepsi bottles into my itunes recycle can for me :D.

Yes, it didn't look good for Apple as some news sites would have you think. But, both Pepsi and Apple made out on this deal. So, stop complaining that it was a bad promo.
 
Flowbee said:
Well, not as many people were doing this as you seem to think. With only 5% of the winning caps redeemed, it's pretty clear that most people who got a winner either didn't know what to do with it or didn't care.

Or...as others have suggested, distrubution was incredibly slow.
 
Well the promotion went pretty well in my case. I usually buy an assortment of pepsi and coke products, but since I first saw the iTunes giveaway bottles I've been buying Pepsi. I think I won about 5-6 songs, but it got me to download the software and try it. I had only been a little interested before, but hey free songs, why not? I've now purchased about 50 songs and I just ordered a 15gb iPod.
 
iggyb said:
Geesh. What an abysmal failure. Of course, since the SuperBowl, I think I saw a promotional commercial once. I think.

:(

Exactly! Pepsi never even advertised this promotion. So how are people going to know or remember about it. Now I was a fortunate one who got these bottles everywhere in my area (Upstate NY) and even in pop machines and I bought I'd say 10 bottles of Pepsi with these caps on them and I won 8 times. I'm not really a Pepsi drinker. I wish they would of done this promotion with Coca-Cola instead of Pepsi.
 
micvog said:
I didn't see a single one where I live (just northwest of L.A.). :mad: I am not sure whether it was intentional or not, but Pepsi had some definate logistics problems with this promo on the west coast. On the positive side, I hate Pepsi and wasn't looking forward to drinking the swill. Long live Coca Cola!

EDIT: Not to defend Pepsi, but thinking about this further, the grocery strike in southern California may have somehow impacted distribution of the iTMS caps.


I didn't find any until about 2 weeks ago (Culver City). I bought 2 bottles - won two songs. I would've bought a heck of a lot more had I been able to find them. A friend and I even drove around one night trying to find some with zero luck. Motarola sucks...errr Pepsi sucks.
 
Pepsi... right on target! NOT.

I'm sure we'll be seeing lots of Pepsi itunes caps over the next two months.
Won't that be fun? Thanks Pepsi, good job! :rolleyes:
 
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