One of the most interesting developments in the golden era of
transparency is that consumers are sharing all kinds of
information to hack/circumvent traditional promotions such as coupons,
contests and giveaways. Consider Apple/Pepsi's music promotion,
which re-launches this week. The two companies are again teaming up to
give away an iPod every hour and free song under the bottle caps of
every one out of three sodas sold. Much like last year however, the
consumers have again cracked the code
making it easy for everyone to consistently win free songs. You would
have thought that Apple/Pepsi would have learned from what happened last year
and changed the packaging...but they didn't. Maybe now that blogs are
much bigger this year than they were in 2004 they will learn this time
the hard way. On the other hand, perhaps this is what they intended to
do to generate more buzz. Hmmm....
