MacMerc’s ’tilt the Pepsi bottle’
p2pnet.net News:- Does this look vaguely familiar – like maybe it’s the pic from MacMerc’s Apple slash Pepsi feature dating back to the Sleeze Bowl of 2004?
You remember it – Apple, Pepsi and the Big Music cartel’s RIAA came up with a “cheeky spot,” as New York Times business writer Stuart Elliott called the commercial where 16 teenaged RIAA victims were ridiculed as file-sharing criminals in an iPod / iTunes promo.
Anway, Part II involved bottles of Pepsi with validation codes printed under the caps. These secret numbers enabled the ‘lucky winners’ to get free tracks from iTunes. At rip-off $1 a download, it’s worth going for a freebie. The trouble – from Apple’s viewpoint – was, all you had to do was tilt the bottles back at a 25-degree angle and read the codes off, as MacMerc quickly figured out.
The promo was a dismal failure and meant Steve Job’s dowloads forecast for the year was way off, but Apple is having another shot at it this year.
Need we say more? Didn’t think so.
Last year, “we let the world know that instead of buying just any iTunes Pepsi (and hoping for a winning bottle), a simple twist of the wrist and a watchful eye could reveal if a bottle had music in its future,” says MacMerc. “We received many media accolades over the piece, but also buckets of hate mail, which just goes to show how seriously some people take this stuff.
“So why am I using this space to tell you a year old story?
“The trick works for the new contest.”
Stay tuned.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet..net
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See:-
Apple slash Pepsi - New iTunes-Pepsi contest, p2pnet, February 18, 2004
new contest – Keep tipping those bottles, it still works, MacMerc.com, February 3, 2005
February 25th, 2005 at 1:51 am
“”The trick works for the new contest.”"
what a bunch of morons…always treating the symptom rather than the source of the problem – them.
February 25th, 2005 at 4:42 am
My guess is they just put “window dressing” on addressing the problem, and actually WANT people to get to the free downloads faster and faster…. faster than actually randomn occurance would take. I mean, really, Pepsi must be kicking back some large $ for this promo, so there is likely little cost…
However, how many new suckers get penned into $1.00 per song downloads?
February 27th, 2005 at 6:33 pm
How to be less of a sucker: Mooch winning caps from Pepsi-product-drinking non-iTunes-using friends. Bonus points if you have friends who use the tilt trick or if you teach it to them.
Just my input. Offtopic maybe, but this isn’t Slashdot.