For you to understand this post, there are two things about myself I should tell you — they’re already well-known to any of my friends:
- I drink a lot of Coke.
- I have catastrophically bad eyesight.
More below the fold.
Right now Coke is running this promotion called MyCokeRewards, wherein every time you buy a Coke product, you get a little 12- or 15-character code, which (when entered into their ridiculous website) adds points to a running total. Eventually you can exchange the points for “free” stuff (it’s not really free — you have to buy the Coke, after all). For example, I downloaded a DRM-encrusted song which was actually a medley of the themes from Pirates of the Caribbean. The prizes are mostly silly but I figure, I drink a lot of Coke (see point #1) anyway, so why not accumulate points and get something back?
Enter point #2. While the codes for 12-packs are printed on the little flap and are easy to read, codes for individual bottles are printed on the individual bottlecaps. For a host of reasons (low light, smudged print, etc.), the bottlecap codes proved impossible for me to read. All told we were talking something like 9 points in a contest where you need something like 3000 to get anything good. On the other hand, I felt entitled to those points, having bought the soda.
So I got out my handy-dandy Vivistar digital camera, threw on “macro” mode, and snapped a shot of each cap. Really. Then during playback I zoomed in and read the codes with ease. Ta-da! Technology to the rescue. This is the sort of unanticipated spin-off effect that drives futurists nuts. No one would predict that owning a digital camera makes participation in Coke give-a-ways easier, and for sure, this benefit didn’t show up on my own pro/con list when considering getting a camera. I wouldn’t have bought it just for this use. But now that I have the camera, a host of unexpected uses have occurred to me, each making my life a tiny bit easier (though none so far afield or as goofy as this one). It’s a lot like “exaptation” in biology
In any event, it’s why I love gadgetry. I love being able to take a device, or several, and get out more than the designers intended. Not as a gotcha-game (“See how much smarter I am than you!”) but as a tiny sliver of creativity, that random thread that keeps the picture interesting.
I’m firmly convinces that those codes were invented because they knew the actualy participation would be phenomenally low. If they just stuck scratch-off cards in the 12 packs, too many people would actually scratch them off. Turns out much cheaper to run a promotion when not many people will claim the prizes….
I’m sure there’s something to be said about the trackability of the website, too. I think there were several reasons Coke went this way, and none of them were chosen for the convenience of the consumer.