Pepsi will launch the largest promotion in its history next month by including points with 4 billion of its products that will be redeemable for up to $1 billion in prizes, including songs from Amazon's MP3 store.
Marketers have long looked to music to help define their brands, and many have attached download codes to beverages. But past downloadable music giveaways have been watered-down by unwelcome digital rights management. The labels who license the music most desired by consumers insisted on it, to try to prevent track giveaways from becoming rights giveaways.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander; the labels' embrace of DRM-free music sales now extends to marketers' free music promotions.
Pepsi's PepsiStuff program (apparently adapted from 2003's PepsiStuff.ca) will offer un-DRMed tracks from Amazon's MP3 store. This isn't the first time a major brand has included DRM-free tracks with products, but it's almost certainly the first time lots of major label content has been included in an MP3 giveaway.
Starting February 1, buyers of qualifying Pepsi products can enter anincluded code (and, most likely, their email addresses and demographicinformation) on the PepsiStuff
site to claim points usable for songs from Amazon MP3's 3.25-million-track catalog, as well as electronics, clothes, DVDs, CDs, and Amazon Unbox credits from the retailer.
Fivepoints will get you a single song download. I don't know what denominationsthe points will be available in, but if past giveaways are any indication you'll get around five points with each 16-ounce purchase of the sugary swill.
Pepsi calls this "the largest promotion [they've] ever done" intheir sixty-plus-year history of media-based marketing, which kickedoff with "the first advertising jingle ever broadcast nationwide."
The program will launch to the public at large during Superbowl 42.
