Let the Seller Beware Promotions Will be Hacked

It's nothing new: we see promotions all the time which plead with us to "look under the winning bottle cap." Unfortunately, the soda companies' unwillingness to add that extra half ounce of over-priced carbonated liquid often throws the promotion statistics out the window. In the age of the Internet, this means that if a promotion can be hacked, it will. Find out how Pepsi and Apple managed to keep a few promo-hackers' hard drives filled with free MP3s--and what CueCat has to do with all of this.

iTunes, Meet Super Bowl

This year, for the first time in my life, I watched a substantial chunk of the Superbowl. And in between cheering on the Panthers and groaning whenever That Northern Team got the upper hand, I watched the commercials. So I saw the ad that promoted the Pepsi-Apple team-up. You know the one: it shows the folks who were busted for copying songs off the Internet, while one of them triumphantly crows that they're going to keep doing it, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. It's a clever way to draw attention to a pretty simple promo: one-third of specially-marked bottles of Pepsi will have, on the underside of their bottlecaps, a 10-digit redemption code that lets the lucky winner download a free tune from Apple's online music store. Normally, these songs cost 99 cents each. According to the promotion, there's 100 million winning bottlecaps out there. That's a lot of Pepsi!

For those who'd love to get the tunes without drinking too much carbonated sugary stuff, MacMerc had the answer. The web site for Mac developers and users pubbed an article, complete with pictures, explaining a low-tech hack for making sure you never get a losing bottle. The trick, according to the article, is to tip the bottle to a 25-degree angle, or "until it seems about that" and then hold it so you can see the underside of the cap. If you see the word "AGAIN" you have a loser (that's all that will be visible of the phrase "Try Again"). Otherwise, you have a winning bottle. Buy that baby; and make sure you keep the cap after the beverage is finished.

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