New Pepsi Apple iTunes ads
p2pnet.net News:- Apple and Pepsi are planning yet another iTunes promotion.
In the first, Apple also teamed up with Big Music’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) in what turned out to be one of the most blatantly exploitative promotions ever staged.
During the 2004 Super Bowl, 16 teenagers were held up in front of millions of tv viewers as ‘copyright violators’ when they’d never appeared in a court or been found guilty of anything. ‘Violators’ looks so much more ‘criminal’ than ‘infringers’.
Annie Leith was 14 when her parents paid the RIAA $3,000 rather than face the record label cartel with its limitless legal and financial resources. She was one of the teenagers featured and it was, “all in good spirit,” said Dave Burwick, chief marketer, Pepsi, North America.
But, “Falsely attributing criminal conduct to someone is a slam-dunk libel in just about every state,” said Josh Wattles, going on, “There’s no calculus of relative harm to justify this kind of abusive, untruthful and cynical behavior towards minors no matter how complicit their misguided parents may have been in this deception.”
Wattles is the former acting general counsel of Paramount Pictures, a key architect of the MPAA’s (Motion Picture Association of America) anti-piracy programs in the transition to videocassette distribution, and the former senior executive in charge of Viacom’s music subsidiaries, The Famous Music Publishing Companies.
This time around, Pepsi and Apple want people to hand over their email addresses promising, “Your email will not be collected or used by Apple or Pepsi-Cola Company for any marketing purposes.”
That still leaves all kinds of other possibilities wide open.
“The promotion, offering a one-in-three chance of winning, runs from January 31, 2005 to April 30, 2005 and will include free iTunes songs and a sweepstakes for approximately 1,700 iPod minis,” says MacCentral.
“Game pieces” will be printed under bottle caps on special “iTunes” 20 oz. and 1 liter bottles of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, and other Pepsi drinks, and under the rim of specific fountain cups at “participating locations”.
Apple and Pepsi’s last attempt at bottle-top promos was an unmitigated disaster.
As MacCentral points out it, “fell well short of expectations giving away 5 million of a possible 100 million songs. Pepsi distributors were slow to get the specially-capped bottles onto store shelves in many locations around the country and weeks went by before many Pepsi drinkers saw the caps.”
And when they did see them, they simply tilted the bottles and read the codes from under the caps.
In the orignial Pepsi Apple promo, “I was one of the kids prosecuted for downloading music,” said a teenaged ‘violator’.
She was not, though, ‘prosecuted’ for anything. She’d never been in a court. She was mouthing words from a script approved by Pepsi and Apple.
However, to make the theme stand up, the message that these kids had been found guilty of “copyright violations” having been “prosecuted” had to be driven home, and hard, and Busted, Charged, Incriminated, and Accused appeared over their images and, Convicted file swappers star in Pepsi Super Bowl ad, read a typical headline from ZDNet.
Convicted? When? By whom? And on what criminal charge?
In During Breaks in Game, Satire and Silliness, New York Times business writer Stuart Elliott thought the stand-out (his words) Super Bowl commercial was a, “cheeky spot, introducing a promotion co-sponsored by the iTunes division of Apple Computer, that smartly teased the recording industry for suing teenagers for illegal file sharing.
“Sixteen of the miscreants appeared in the commercial, identified with tongue-in-cheek labels like ‘Incriminated,’ ‘Accused” and ‘Busted,’ as the soundtrack played ‘I Fought the Law (and the Law Won).’ The jest was topped at the end as these words appeared on screen: ‘Drink down Pepsi and download music at iTunes. Legally’.”
Only in America.
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See:-
cynical, blatantly exploitative - Pepsi-iTunes Super Bowl ad blasted, p2pnet, January 21, 2004
sweepstakes – Apple, Pepsi partner for second iTunes promotion, MacCentral,, January 18, 2005
read the codes – New iTunes-Pepsi contest, p2pnet, Februaryy 18, 2004
January 20th, 2005 at 4:42 am
What was the Band that remade that I fought the law song!!!! They have to be the biggest sellouts of all time!!! Boycott their ass!!!
January 20th, 2005 at 1:27 pm
The band was / is Green Day.
January 20th, 2005 at 4:32 pm
Anyone have a link to the site where you could submit codes in protest?? I believe it was in support of indy artists