How not to do a promotional Rewards Campaign

I was excited when Coca-Cola, a couple years ago, released its MyCokeRewards program. Of course I like to get things for free, especially when the place I worked had 20oz bottles of coke for a mere $0.30. But, I also guess this was due in part to a fond memory of a coke promotion about 20 years ago where you saved and turned in red-colored tab tops for certain prizes. Most of those prizes were just coke schwag, although I did not know that term back then. Still, they were simple and cool. I had a coke t-shirt I wore at many a tennis tournament, and some coke glasses (the old float-style kind) that my parents may still have one or two of at their house.

Fast forward to the MyCokeRewards promotion and you will see an utter failure. Whereas the former one had an easy system (collect tabs, turn them in at the mall) the current promotion has a website that is such a pain in the ass to navigate, I never visit it. The site does not remember my username and password (even with Firefox), so I have to log in each time I want to enter a code, and it is laden with so much Flash that I hesitate to use it on anything but my gaming computer. Luckily, you can associate your mobile phone with it, and enter codes with a simple text message. So, even though it is a pain to enter a 10-15 digit code (they vary) in text message, it is much much better than using a computer.

But the real failure with the promotion is that the rewards are not very good. Sure, there is a flat-screen television, but it would take days, if not weeks, of straight typing just to enter the codes. The attainable rewards are pure rubbish. Most are just marketing items, and they're not even useful like the ones I mentioned above, and many of them are just entries in sweepstakes. So, even though I continue to drink Coke, I mostly ignore the available rewards.

And, I didn't give it much thought until I was looking at Amazon's new video offering, and even though I think they need to enable the videos to run everywhere, it is not a bad-looking service. The big takeaway from looking at it, however, was the ability to spend your PepsiStuff points on music and video downloads from Amazon. The music downloads are DRM-free, which is huge. Hopefully, Amazon will be heading in that direction with the video offering.

I present the pepsi offering as the way to do it. Tie yourself in with a popular website. Now, I can go to Amazon and buy some things I actually want with either Pepsi points or a credit card. How perfect is that? And it drives both products. I do not know how easy it is to enter the rewards, but at the very least they have rewards worth pursuing, and that's the most important part.