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Apple and Pepsi Do it Again 81

Posted by michael from the baby-baby-one-more-time dept.
memoryhole writes "It seems the old Apple/Pepsi team are at it again with an iTunes promotion, or will be very soon -- they'll even notify you by email when it starts. Odds: 1 in 3, this time across the whole line of Pepsi products, including Mountain Dew and Sierra Mist. Maybe this time they'll actually have some in my area."
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Apple and Pepsi Do it Again More

Apple and Pepsi Do it Again

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  • Apple is also giving away an iPod mini every hour [apple.com]

    • Re:Don't forget the iPod mini giveaways (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Mod you +97 INFORMATIVE.

      Thank you for providing the exact same link that was in the summary. You are truly a master of this new-fangled interweb hyperlinking thing.

      Your family must be proud.

      ---

      You could have at least pointed out that the rules state that the giveaway is for people who redeem the caps, not for just entering your email in the box. See item 7 in the sweepstakes rules [apple.com]
      • Go fuck yourself.

        This post was informative - I pointed out the iPod mini giveaway.

        Further, my link was relevant. Yeah it was the same link as the main story. So what? It contained information relative to what I was posting about.

        And you post annonymous - why, to protect your Karma on some Internet chat group? Pathetic.

    • Re:Don't forget the iPod mini giveaways (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Great that this is modded redundant - even though it is the first post!
  • Between the story title and my thoughts on P2P over the last few days, it occurs to me that one of the things that I love(d) about the old Napster (AudioGnome, circa 2000-2001) was the ability to find stuff like this [mp3miracle.com].

    That's the one things that will always be missing from commercial efforts. The stuff you won't hear on the radio. :\

    Anyhoo. Game on. What's the status on PlayFair/FairPlay these days anyway?
    • Hymn [hymn-project.org] is what PlayFair once was.

      Always remember to convert your purchases to m4a from m4p and back them up!
      • And make sure that backup is well off site, say, halfway across the country. :)

        I played the game with 7-Eleven cups last year and got 20-something free songs out of it. Not sure if I'll do it again this year, though. You can usually get 2-liter bottles on sale for under a buck at the grocery (wait for a good sale and stock up). So for about $2 I can get 67 ounces of soda and a song from iTMS.

        With this promotion, I need 3 bottles at about $1.20 a pop for a reasonable chance at one song. That's 60 ounc

      • If it was not for Hymn, I probably would never buy from iTunes knowing the file is permanently stuck to m4p format.

        I'd have to settle for allofmp3.com or something. Speaking of which, has anyone in the U.S found a way to buy from this site using non-credit card methods? I believe they discontinued paypal. And webmoney is russian.

  • did they cheat proof the bottle? (Score:5, Informative)

    by jxyama ( 821091 ) on Thursday January 20, 2005 @04:03PM (#11423324)
    in the first promotion, you could cheat by tilting the bottle to look at the cap before purchasing. did they fix this? (which would be good in some sense because they'd have to put more soda in there...)

    • Re:did they cheat proof the bottle? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      My friend's sister had one of the pepsi guys ask what she was doing when she was checking out the bottles in a grocery store. Her response was something like "if you guys filled it up all the way I couldn't do this." The pepsi guy laughed and helped her find some more bottles with winning caps.

      Local college book store had signs infront of the pepsi products "NO LOOKING UNDER THE CAPS UNTIL PURCHASED" at the same time as well.
    • nope.

      i broke the story on macrumors a few days ago.
      my stack of winning caps on my desk at home says, no, they did not cheat proof it.

    • which would be good in some sense because they'd have to put more soda in there..

      I doubt Pepsi intends to suddenly change the amount of soda they include in the bottle, rewrite all their labels to that effect, etc. Especially since they could just have a removable, opaque thing inside the cap that you remove with a tab after you open the cap. That'd make it pretty cheat proof.

  • iPod mini too! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OmniVector ( 569062 ) <see my homepage> on Thursday January 20, 2005 @04:03PM (#11423329) Homepage
    they didn't mention it for some reaosn, but you can also expect one ipod mini per hour given away. (of course, the odds are probably pretty awful if you do the math). still, pretty cool.

    i think they're nuts for not including the ipod shuffle as part of the giveaway with this, with a higher chance than a mini maybe?
    • Probably because they ran out of iPod Shuffles so they have none to give away. :)
    • (of course, the odds are probably pretty awful if you do the math).

      Keep up that attitude and enter anyway. I won two 20 GB iPods in the Pepsi Canada iPod-an-hour giveaway late last year.

      I didn't really believe I'd won until I actually had the iPod in my hands.

      • Well if the redemption rates this year are anythign like last year, then I'd imagine that your odds are pretty good. Only like 5% of the caps were redeemed last year. I wouldn't mind an ipod mini. Back to drinking diet pepsi again I guess.

  • Read the fine print (Score:4, Informative)

    by amichalo ( 132545 ) on Thursday January 20, 2005 @04:06PM (#11423368)
    Interesting change in the rules:
    - 10 redemptions per day
    - 200 redemptions total
    fine print [apple.com]

    I guess this is 10 in 24 hrs, 200 total per iTMS account, not physical person, as a jr/sr may live in the same house and each have an iTMS account.

    This should also prevent unintended [splitfocus.org] use of the promotion.
    • At IU one of my friends collected 52 $1 gift certificates from large fries from the McDonalds Monopoly thing, spent them online, and then spent them in the store the next day.

      $104 dollars at BB just for eating fries...imagine if he really tried, or even just stole other people's gamepieces.
  • Actually I never buy pop so this doesn't affect me at all. I certainly won't go out of my way to buy Pepsi products just because I might win a free song. I'll just spend the $.99 at iTMS without the middleman.

    It is really good marketing though, and will further cement Apple's dominance in the digital music world.
    -------------
    Check out http:freeipodsconga.com/ [freeipodsconga.com]
  • where's the rpm?
    • 1) iTunes Server For Linux:
      http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?sto ry=20030 711140157143

      2) Lsongs (Not Free though)
      http://www.linspire.com/lindows_products_ details.p hp?package_name=lsongs

      3) Rythmbox (People should be familiar with this one)
      http://rhythmbox.sourceforge.net/

      4) Use Codeweaver and the win32 port of iTunes.
    • Sorry, the Red Hat kool-aid is incompatible with the Apple kool-aid. Luckily the Apple kool-aid does almost everything the Red Hat kool-aid does, except run on Wintel kool-aid hardware. And the Mac Mini is soooooo cute.
  • Rubbish distribution stymied the last giveaway - Apple gave away less than a tenth of the songs they expected too.

    They probably fixed this problem too (unfortunately):
    http://www.macmerc.com/news/archives/1270 [macmerc.com]

  • Why can't Apple have a promotion with some product I'd actually want to buy?

    "Now what do you have to wash that awful taste out of my mouth?"

    "Mountain Dew or crab juice."

    "Blecch! Ew! Sheesh! I'll take a crab juice."
    • Why can't Apple have a promotion with some product I'd actually want to buy?

      Why invent the future when you can sell sugar-water to children?
    • Because the porn industry didn't ask Apple to do one with them?
    • Why can't Apple have a promotion with some product I'd actually want to buy?

      The margins are probably less ridiculous on the products you buy.

      Except Aquafina isn't included - talk about a margin - a buck fifty for 20 oz of water! The Saudis wish they had such a racket.
      • The cost of a bottle of soda mostly the cost of bottling it, shipping it, and keeping it in a refrigerator until you buy it.

        Apart from carbonated water, there's only a couple cents worth of actual ingredients in a soda bottle. Which means that the cost of a bottle of water, even if they just fill it from an unfiltered tap at their factory, is almost exactly the same cost as a bottle of soda.

        When I buy a bottle of water on a hot summer day, I don't think of it as buying water. I think of it as leasing re
        • The cost of a bottle of soda mostly the cost of bottling it, shipping it, and keeping it in a refrigerator until you buy it.

          Exactly, so if cryptochrome thinks soda is gross, he's probably buying 100% juice products or something that actually costs something to prepare. So there's less room in the price for throwing in 21.3 cents worth of an iTune since the product has to compete with nearly-free products like soda.
  • I'll just get the Dew, look at the cap, and chuck it (the cap, not the Dew. The Dew I will slam). iTMS is nice enough for an online music service, but still not worth using: when I seriously investigated it (after it was fully up to speed with # of songs), only 1 in 20 songs I wanted were on it. Then there was kludgey hassle of having to burn to a CD and re-rip just to be able to listen on my MP3 player.

    Looking forward to seeing if Snocap [snocap.com] takes care of the problem of "hardly any music in the legit downloa

    • Re:I will likely never redeem them. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jxyama ( 821091 ) on Thursday January 20, 2005 @04:20PM (#11423587)
      i'm pretty sure that's perfectly fine for both pepsi and apple. you bought a drink and apple didn't have to give you a song.

      but you will be a minority, i'm fairly sure. many will go through with the iTMS process - afterall, it's "free."

      • The original was 100 million caps. That's 100 million free songs. If I remember correctly, a little over 5 million redeemed their free songs. I can't find a link to verify that, but I know Pepsi's original prediction was 10-20%.

        A lot of people won't even know they're getting a free song. They'll just not think about it and throw it away.
    • don't waste. post the code on your blog for someone else to use!

    • Then there was kludgey hassle of having to burn to a CD and re-rip just to be able to listen on my MP3 player.

      Someone on Slashdot cannot figure out how to un-DRM music from the ITMS without burning a CD??? It's not even illegal. Jeez! Their are freeware programs that do it automatically.

  • "Apple and Pepsi Do it" (Score:4, Funny)

    by Fr05t ( 69968 ) on Thursday January 20, 2005 @04:17PM (#11423535)
    I hope they use birth control cause those would be some ugly kids.
  • While the last promotion was going on, deep in the winter, I would walk into the store and they'd still be selling Pepsi with variations of "Summer fun!" on them. Maybe they had the Apple/Pepsi bottles in the back, but I guess they just have them in a queue; sell the old ones first.

    Can PepsiCo "demand" or "insist" that these bottles be put up first, or are they really at the mercy of the owner once the bottles hit the store?
    • At least when i worked in retail in the UK, not really, they can send promotional stands and the like and hope the owners use them, but unless their providing the fridge or something they have little control about what goes on!

      Cigarette companies actually *buy* shelf space at kiosks and so are very rigid about getting what they want
    • They're at the mercy of the bottlers, too. The bottlers have to put the new caps into production. During the last promotion, I finally saw the iTunes caps at my local store after the last day you could redeem the code.
    • Can PepsiCo "demand" or "insist" that these bottles be put up first, or are they really at the mercy of the owner once the bottles hit the store?

      Probably both.

    • Can PepsiCo "demand" or "insist" that these bottles be put up first, or are they really at the mercy of the owner once the bottles hit the store?

      I think they already do. Everytime I've ever seen anyone in the grocery store stocking Pepsi or Lays (another PepsiCo product) they are stocked by representatives of those companies. With the advent of "big box" retailers (WalMart) and the homogenization of the retail experience, retailers and suppliers enter into big dollar agreements on where there products wi

  • I like the odds (Score:2, Interesting)

    by elecngnr ( 843285 )
    Hell, I drink one or two of the 20 oz bottles every week day, so assuming the promotion goes for something like 60 days--I could be wrong on that number--I have a chance to win between 20 and 30 songs. I will probably end up with more from coworkers and others who do not redeem their caps. Last year I ended up with almost 70 songs. But I have had a few coworkers migrate to Apple this year, so they may hold on to them. Kind of win-win for me.
    • That's pretty much what I did last time. I ended up getting about 40 songs. And since they were free, I ended up trying a bunch of different genres that I normally wouldn't spend actual money on. Some of them I ended up liking and bought more music in those genres, broadening my horizons.

      But my stomach still hasn't recovered from all that Pepsi.
  • They'll even notify you by email when it starts. Odds: 1 in 3.

    They may as well just give them away! I mean, come on - most of us will be gulping down this stuff from the vending machines at work.

    Apple is so far ahead of the competition it's unreal. This sort of stuff has the iTunes and iPod brands on everyone's lips. I don't see anyone catching them anytime soon.

    • Re:Dish 'Em Out (Score:3, Funny)

      by k_187 ( 61692 )
      Especially since you can tilt the bottles and see if they're a winner or not. I was 54 for 54 last year in 20oz bottles.

  • 'Scuse me (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    iBurp

  • It's not quite "again" (Score:5, Informative)

    by digitalgimpus ( 468277 ) on Thursday January 20, 2005 @04:52PM (#11423977) Homepage
    It's actually a slightly improved campaign...

    I documented the details on MacVillage.net summarizing how it works:

    http://macvillage.net/news/archives/2005/01/18/200 000000-itunes-and-a-bunch-of-silver-ipod-minis/ [macvillage.net]

    It's a pretty cool campaign. Odds are you'll end up with something if you buy 3 pepsi's (or other products). And just that 1 chance gets you a bunch of chances at a free iPod mini.

    The iPod is branded for Pepsi... so you can most likely get a little extra for it on eBay... since there's a lot of coke/pepsi collectors out there.

    That is if you don't want (or already have) an iPod.

  • Not cost effective (Score:4, Informative)

    by FangVT ( 144970 ) on Thursday January 20, 2005 @04:55PM (#11424018) Homepage
    Last time they did this I went out looking for the products and did some comparisons and calculations. What I found was that, in every supermarket that had the promotional bottles, the promotional bottles were only sold singly, generally out of refrigerated display cases, while the six-packs were non-promotional bottles. Some quick calculations showed that the price difference for buying the six-packs was enough cheaper than the individual bottles that, assuming I hit the average of one in three bottles actually giving me a free song, I would end up paying more per song than the US$.99 that the ITMS charged.

    Now this time they've spiked the deal by the inclusion of drawings for special edition (has the Pepsi logo) iPod Minis, so that skews the calculation, but only very slightly.


    • Last time they did this, taking the sales tax into account, it was two cents cheaper for me to get a song by buying a winning bottle of Pepsi (I cheated, see here [slashdot.org]) than it was for me to buy the song directly from the iTMS. And that doesn't even take into account the value of the Pepsi itself.
    • pepsi is paying apple so some cola drinkers will be enticed to buy a pepsi instead of a coke by offering iTMS songs as incentives. nothing more, nothing less. if you just want a song, yeah, like you said, just go to iTMS and buy one...
  • Maybe this time they'll actually have some in my area.

    But you didn't say "... before the deadline."

  • This really does work for both Pepsi and Apple (Score:3, Insightful)

    by amichalo ( 132545 ) on Thursday January 20, 2005 @08:06PM (#11426319)
    Based on my behavior last year and my excitement about this year's promotion, I would say this is a big win-win for both Pepsi and Apple. If done annually, it may even become as popular as McDonald's Monopoly game, arguably oen fo the most successful giveaways of its kind until they busted the insiders who rigged the Corvette winnings several years in a row (dumb and dumber).

    But I digress...

    Apple and Pepsi have achieved several goals:
    1 - Get the name out. As the even launch data approaches, more and more free publicity will be generated in the main stream (non-tech) media.
    2 - Get more people drinking Pepsi. Done. I don't drink Pepsi as a matter of course but will switch from Diet Dr. Peper to Diet Pepsi like Wade Boggs swiched to the Yankees for a chance at a free song and a free iPod mini [slashdot.org].
    3 - Get more people using (locking in) to iTunes Music Store. Ofcourse Apple wants new people to come to the store and get more tunes but they also want existing iTunes Music Store customers to get in on the act too. Why? Because an existing user has already proven they will pay for iTMS tracks (unless all they have are other giveaways) so if they go to redeem a free song, they might buy one or ten while they are at the store. But most importantly is lockin. Ever song Apple sells today, even if they give them away, just lengthens the lead iTMS/iPod has because if a user is considering a switch from iTMS to say Napster, and they have 100 songs, purchased or free, they are going to say "damn, it will cost me $99 just to get the music I already have at iTMS!"

    Okay, they might not say "damn", but they will say the rest.

    • Re:This really does work for both Pepsi and Apple (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sl3xd ( 111641 ) * on Friday January 21, 2005 @06:46AM (#11430031) Journal
      You're forgetting something: You can still burn a CD from iTunes, and then rip it into whatever format you like. Lock-in isn't even an issue to me. Which do I trust more: A lock-in to what is in the end, Microsoft and it's Windows Media format, or to Apple with its FairPlay-DRM'd AAC?

      Napster, along with pretty much every other if iTunes' competitors all use Windows Media -- somehow using Windows Media is more 'open'? There is absolutely nothing about Windows Media that is published, other than how to access and use its libraries. Apple's format has only the DRM unpublished (officially, anyway); the rest is AAC -- a standardized, published format.

      Frankly, both aren't the optimum, but I'm far less comfortable with Microsoft holding the leash, and every music purchase from the array of Windows Media hawkers being controlled by Microsoft. I've tried buying music from a Windows Media store, and due to the lousy way Microsoft did WMA's DRM, I lost over $50 in music that is completely unplayable, claiming that I don't have the proper liscence, even though I backed up my 'licence' files, etc. That music store was not at all interested in customer service...

      I honestly get sick of people who try to say that choosing an even more proprietary solution is the 'open' way -- espescially when that proprietary solution is Microsoft. Windows Media stores don't offer choice; they are even more restricting than iTunes. I've tried both, and iTunes is easily and handily the best, most 'open' method available. The only difference between Apple and Microsoft's way is that Apple is much more selective in whom can sell products with the 'black box' that decodes iTunes music (Apple and HP). Microsoft was far less discriminating in that respect; but the end result is the same in both cases: The black box is still entirely closed...

      They are both closed systems. But I'm willing to live with iTunes, as it's the best solution available at the present time.
  • From the official contest rules:
    Must be 13 or older and a legal resident residing in the U.S. to play.
    I'd hoped now that they have a Canadian iTunes Music Store (not to mention all the other international stores) that we'd be able to participate in promotions like these. That's too bad, the non-US market for Pepsi (and ITMS) is not exactly a small percentage of the total.
    • Yeah, it's kind of a bummer that we won't get this promo, but Pepsi Canada and Apple just finished with this one [macminute.com] last month so I'm not too upset. Hmmm... I guess I'd be even less upset if I had actually won anything though.

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