Apple Made Me Do It: A Convenience Store, A Freshly Stocked Cooler and Me

If you're not familiar with the latest Pepsi/Apple promotion, you're probably not living in the US. The campaign is brilliant - buy a bottle of Pepsi or Diet Pepsi & check the cap for a code. If you get a free iTunes song, you enter the code into your iTunes application and you get a credit for any song you want. It's hip. It's hot. And it's instant gratification.

I'd been on the lookout for the new Pepsi bottles for weeks - checking every cooler I passed at the mall, the grocery and the many many airports I spend time in, but I'd had no luck. Weeks of no luck. Weeks of drinking diet coke in protest. ;)

And then it happened: standing in front of the frosty freshly stocked Pepsi cooler I saw a glimmer from the back row - the long awaited yellow caps!

With precision and balance as can only be achieved holding a laptop bag, keys, and wallet while perched on 3" heels, I eagerly pulled blue capped bottle after blue capped bottle until I reached the elusive yellow caps. (Yes, I put the others back when I was done.)

Sure, people stared - snickered and gasped even.

But I didn't care. I had two frosty, bubbly, yellow capped Pepsi's. Blissful.

Using the web isn't anything new you say? Yes, the web has been used for promotion before, but never this effortlessly. Even if you're not an iTunes freak, or a Pepsi fan, this is one marketing campaign to watch and learn from.

P.S. 2 bottles - 2 winners. Time to turn up the tunes.