“Apple Computer said Wednesday that about 5 million free songs have been given away through a Pepsi promotion, far fewer than the 100 million tracks that could have been redeemed. An Apple representative said the music giveaway was probably the biggest ever of its kind but admitted that the company gave away fewer songs than it had intended,’ Ina Fried reports forCNET News. “‘We had hoped the redemptions would have been higher,’ said Katie Cotton, Apple’s vice president of worldwide corporate communications. Customers with winning bottle caps have until Friday to redeem their free music tracks.”
“Cotton noted that the yellow-capped bottles with the Apple song codes were late in reaching some key markets. However, Cotton said the promotion did introduce a lot of people to iTunes. The 5 million free tracks Pepsi gave away were included as part of Apple’s statement earlier Wednesday that it has sold 70 million songs in the first year of its music service. Apple said last fall that it hoped to distribute 100 million tracks in its first year, but when that figure was calculated it was expected that more winning bottle caps would be redeemed,” Fried reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Not good. Not good at all. It’s nice to see our suspicions confirmed that Apple would be counting the Pepsi giveaway songs in the one year anniversary total, but only 5 million redemptions? Now, where the hell are those other 95 million caps?!
Silverlining….
May be we are looking at this only 70M songs in wrong way. Let assume for an argument, Windows users are as honest as Mac users. Most of them are willing to obtain song legally, just like the Mac users. As a demographic, users who would be interested in purchasing songs through an online service are same for both wintel and mac users. Now, what could have caused Steve and company with all the wisdom in statistics to misestimate the number of sales? Obiously there was an error in their assumption. I believe they did. They used wrong market share number. The number they used for PC vs. Mac user share was much larger than actual. If they assumed Mac only has 2% of user base, then they would have expected 49x increase in sales. Even if they assume they will only get 50% of them, due to fact it is not a MS product, they could get 24.5x increase. In reality they only got 7.2x (1.8M per week / 250K per week) boost. May be the Mac user base was much larger than even SJ&Co; has anticipated.
“What’s this McDonald’s promo that everyone’s talking about? Didn’t that get shot down?” – solid
NY Post broke the news (more like rumors actually) a long time ago that MacDonald’s would partner with Apple to give away iTunes songs with purchased meals. However, things happened and MacDonald’s will partner with Sony to distribute songs in ATRAC format. I guess all is fair in business, after all, Apple did kick Napster’s deal with HP. You win some, you lose some.
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Thanks Nobody.
If somebody told me at a bar I could get a free dollar by walking around all night with a dirty, bulky, sticky bottle cap in my pocket, and then to redeem it I’d have to go home and get on the computer to type a code into a redemption system, I’d say, “No thanks man. You can keep your measly dollar. I ain’t that desperate.”
What a stupid promotion.
Nice bar you go to… serves bottled Pepsi. Walking around all night with that surgar rush must be a lot of fun! Must have your keys on a chain too, since you don’t like the “bulk” in the pocket… or are you not old enough to drive?
I never saw ONE Pepsi Itunes bottle in LA. Not a ONE!
It’s worth pointing out that even with such a ‘poor’ result, iTMS will still achieve its 100 million goal in around 70 days just in time for the June reporting cycle, and the announcement of another 700,000 iPods sold.
It’s also worth stating that, with the current rate of acceleration, the second 100 million will take around 160 days assuming iTMS gets announced for at least three of the remaining G8 countries (take your pick from UK, Germany, France and Japan).
So really, is this that big a deal? Or is it just a diversion from the real topics which are iPod numbers nearly doubling every six months and iTMS downloads doubling since 12/12/03.
Doubtless the WMA community and the strangely out-of-step Rob Glaser will paint this as an indication of a huge failure, but the question for them is: why don’t they even have partners with which to run 100 million download promotions?
OD2 which runs MyCokeMusic and nearly all of the European sites (for Tiscali and MSN amongst others) was thrilled to deliver one million downloads for the whole of Jan-Mar 04. Let’s keep a sense of perspective.
Webmaster’s Apprentice: I didn�t say ebay was going away, it is going to reach its maturity and then it will not grow anymore. There are only so many people interested in any product or service. Soon ebay will reach that point.
And with eBay most of the new listings are not from new customers but rather from corporations dumping thousands and thousands of used products; such as Dell, IBM and others.
Just as apple, bmw, ford, etc. have found there are only so many people interested in its products.
The last 20% of consumers is harder to get than the first 80%.
I live in London, UK and was in Vegas on a business trip. I got three winning Yellow caps in a row from a Pepsi bottle vending machine and didn’t use them. I didn’t have an iPod at the time and wasn’t sure if I could sign up for the free music being outside the USA. Sadly I don’t have a laptop at the moment so didn’t do anything with the caps whilst in the USA. I did notice the complete lack of yellow capped bottled in stores and wondered why the only ones I saw were in vending machines – to cut down on people tipping the bottles to look under the caps perhaps?
Anway, I think that once the iTMS is available over here in the UK and Europe the promotion may get repeated, at least I hope it does!
Earth to sugared-water world, here is the news:
Coke=Pepsi
get over it already
i love this promo! i work in a small factory in new england and the “roach coach” sells yellow capped Pepsi. out of about 25 employees i am the only iTunes user. i have redeemed at least 30 caps, with about 15 to go!
we need more iTunes users.
I redeemed close to 50 songs without any problem. I didn’t get many caps at first, but then I was getting about 60% of the bottles I bought. It also helped that I talked pepsi drinking friends to save their caps and give them to me. Thanks Apple/Pepsi.
downloading w/56k is a drag. I didn’t catch on to the pepsi give away till two weeks ago. Every cap was a winner!
http://phenomi.net/153fish
We had bottles for most of the promo (just bought a few on Saturday, the last I’ve seen). I redeemed 30-40. I wouldn’t call it a failure, what is the redemption rate on any of the bottle cap promos they do? They had an NFL cap promo recently. How many caps do you think they gave away? Probably not nearly as many. I cashed in two of those, and I hardly even took part in that one. I’m impressed with 5 million. Did anyone actually believe there would be 100 mil given away? What a joke! There’s no way it would be even close. Sailfish, I think you were pretty close. Fact is, lots of people who got the winners don’t have/use computers (sorry, computers aren’t as heavily used by the general public as the computer industry would like to believe). I talked to people who threw out tons of the caps. They never bothered to look at them or figure out what the promo was. Apart from the Superbowl, how many ads did you see? I saw none.
I have the other 95 million caps and they are mine all mine!
As someone who doesn’t drink a lot of soda to begin with, and usually drinks Coke (because I cannot stand Pepsi), I only won 1 free song on a bottle of Sierra Mist. What the hell am I going to do with 1 free song? Sure, I could redeem it just for the hell of it. But my point is that I bet there are a LOT of people out there with a few caps and are probably just sitting on them and/or have lost them. Frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t lose mine.
Does anyone know what the standard/typical redemption rate is for bottle cap promotions? I’d be surprised if it is over 10%. McDonald’s never has to pay for all of their “Monopoly” promotion prizes, either. This is a simple rebate scheme where the companies are counting on folks not jumping through the hoops.
Personally, I bought exactly one bottle of sugarwater (I prefer Coke products) and didn’t win a song. I then saw the absurdity of it all. I spent more than .99 for a bottle of stuff that I didn’t want, and could have just paid for through iTMS and had the song, and not have to deal with the hoops.
I live in a pretty good sized metropolitan area. Never once have I seen a Pepsi bottle featuring the iTunes promotion in real life. Ever. And I’ve been looking. Terrible distribution on Pepsi’s part. No wonder this promotion wound up making a big sucking sound.
Bizarro Jeff
most people don�t want to hassle with getting a free song.
whoopdidoo – a free song. guess i will turn on the radio…whoopdidoo, i�m listening to a free song.
Anybody else notice how the percent of Pepsi iTunes caps redeemed just about equals the market share of Apple computers….
Marketing 101 you are living in the distant past….. The promo redemption rate is about 6-7 times greater than Apple current quarter market share.
(your mileage or opinion may vary ; )
What a FSCK up promotion, never landed in bumb fsck South Carolina, but whats new? we dont have 1 Apple store so no wonder we didnt get one FSCKing bottle of Pepsi. what a screwed up effort. also let me get this right i have a ipod so i will buy a Mac when Macs are still using G4s that equal P4s from 2 years ago? am i missing something or is Apple ran by a bunch of Tards? Tards but rich Tards.
Applesniffer:
Yes, it’s Apple’s fault that Pepsi’s local distributor didn’t get its act together either through accident or design.
It’s also Apple’s fault that the Mac-owning population of South Carolina isn’t large enough for an Apple Store.
I believe they’re also to blame for world poverty and the Confederacy losing the Civil War.
BTW, you can use an iPod with a Windows PC – it says so on the box, but then you’d need a command of the English language for that to be of relevance to you.
I wonder at what point Pepsi became aware of the the “tilt” technique of identifying a winner. It could very well be possible that they became aware of this in time to drag their feet on getting the bottles out in stores. I mean Pepsi never intended to ACTUALLY give away 100 million dollars. I think Apple was hoping for 30 million and the 5 million that went out was probably more in line with Pepsi’s original intent. Of course maybe they were just inept….