“Pepsi-Cola’s attention-getting Super Bowl ad campaign offering free music downloads from Apple’s iTunes Music Store hasn’t paid off in a big digital sales spike — yet. Bottles with the winning promotions took longer to get into stores than expected,” Jefferson Graham reports for USA Today.
“Specially marked bottles of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Sierra Mist offer free download codes in bottle caps. But they arrived in New York last week, four weeks after 90 million viewers saw the Super Bowl ad. The bottles have yet to show up in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest media market, and won’t get there until mid-March, Pepsi says,” Graham reports.
”’You can’t spike sales in February if the bottles aren’t there,” says Charles Wolf, an analyst with Wall Street research firm Needham & Co. ‘My guess is there’s going to be a sales increase, but a month later than expected,'” Graham reports.
Graham reports, ”’Marketing 101 is that you don’t advertise something unless you have it out on the shelves,’ says Mark Hughes, CEO of consultant BuzzMarketing. ‘If the caps aren’t out there, what’s the point?’ Pepsi spokesman Dave DeCecco says the company isn’t disappointed. ‘There’s no perfect scenario,’ he says. ‘You can’t push a button and get (the bottles) everywhere.”’
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews artcile:
Are Pepsi iTunes caps available in your area? – February 09, 2004
Still haven’t seen a single one. And I’ve been looking!
Long Beach/Garden Grove CA.
Haven’t seen a single one in Queens, New York myself! Forest Hills, Woodhaven, Glendale area of Queens to be exact.
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What’s the dillyo yo?
I want my P-EP-SI!
Starting to pop up around the Lakes Region NH and greater Portland in ME. I’m 3 for 4, not bad!!
So far I have redemed 7. Cleveland, OH
20 winners and counting… pepsi bottles are flying off the shelves in Upstate ny. Seems the yellow tops go and the blue tops stay.
Well, I am 2 for 2. My winning bottles were in Tallahassee, FL and Tifton, GA. I have also seen the specially marked bottles in Columbia, SC, Detroit, MI, Atlanta, GA and Macon, GA.
I don’t drink pepsi but somebody I work with gave me about 7 winning caps here in Arkansas.
I’ve gotten about 10, Olympia, Washington. I’ve been telling my kids to spread the word, I’m paying .25 for every cap the kids get at school.
Part of the problem here is all the fricking stores are only selling 24 oz bottles now (and the iTunes promo is in 20 oz). Who needs 24 oz of soda/pop? No wonder this country is so obese.
from Minneapolis, at work here in the vending machines, I am getting a lot of winners. So far, I believe to have won around 25+ songs. pretty sweet.
too bad that there are going to be a lot of caps in people’s hands after the promotion is over …
No bottles of pepsi in San Diego. There are 7-11 big gulp cups that are part of the contest. I have about 12 winners from about 30 cups.
The problem now is that either customers or 7-11 employees are going through the cups and taking the winners. Out of the 30 cups in the dispenser, all of them showed signs of tampering.
Is there a redemption time limit. I hope they extend it.
They are all over Boston. Nearby 7-ll has the fountain cups as well. I’m 1 for 3.
Just saw my first yellow caps last night here in the Denver area. Didn’t buy/try so I didn’t win. Those of you that are winning, are you cheating or winning the honest way?
Contest ends on 3/31/04. You can redeem a maximum of 10 per day or 200 total for the entire contest (that’s per email address).
You can redeem through the end of APRIL. The bottles were supposed to be on shelves only for Feb and March. But perhaps now an unexpected number will be on shelves later than that.
If they came in multi-packs I’d go for it. I’m seldom in a position to buy single beverages, though–it’s not economical.
We haven’t had this problem in Dallas. These bottles have been everywhere since the second week of February here.
the Caps are showing up here in San Francisco, but not on Sierra Mist yet. It seems only the diet ones have winners though.
They’re in New York? I’ve been trying and trying at a big deli right under an iTunes/Pepsi billboard – still no go! Or anywhere else around here (meaning fricking Manhattan!)
Maybe they’ll extend the contest because they’ve had problems distributing the bottles
I finally found some in Albuquerque. The store had 3, I bought them all and won 2. However, I realized that I totally forgot how much I hate Pepsi so I’m really wasting my money paying $1.19 for a beverage I can’t stand just to get a free song instead of just paying 99� for the song. So I won’t be looking anymore.
I lost track on my winnings, though I could go back and count from the receipts, I’m sure I’m 20+. I’ve gotten winners on both 20 oz and 1 liter bottles, so size isn’t an issue. Still haven’t seen any on Sierra Mist yet. As far as winning honestly, I usually try to look at the first one, but I haven’t found it to be as easy as people say. If I can tell its a loser on my first bottle I put it back and take the second one regardless. All this caffeine makes me too impatient to look through bottles. *jitter*
Oh yeah, north central Illinois.
They finally arrived in Honolulu, HI last week. I’m 3 of 4 right now.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….
they should have gave away some free ipods and apple computers, too or did i miss that part?