🥤Pepsi and Apple’s botched 2004 iTunes Campaign

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Happy Monday everyone!

Over the weekend, I did a deep dive into the shape of the early 2000s era of the music industry, and how it would define the height of the battle between Internet companies and the Record Labels.

We all know about Napster’s story, and how they disrupted the way people consumed music, practically overnight, eventually being sued most famously by the rock band Metallica for copyright infringement.

In case you’re behind with that whole bit, check out this mini-thread we posted a while back on Twitter 👇🏻

However, one of such innumerable incidents stood out to me, as an interesting case study of how to not screw up a marketing campaign, ironically run by arguably two of the best marketing companies of the past 50 years.

Apple and Pepsi 📈

Back in 2004, the US recording industry pivoted from litigation against teenagers to engage with them by partnering with Apple and Pepsi to promote 100 million free download codes on the newly launched iTunes service.

1 free song download with every winning bottle purchased.

Sounds like a great deal right?

iTunes had just launched a couple of years back, and Pepsi was looking for something innovative for their usual Super Bowl half-time Ad slot.

The objective was very clear:

Get more people to use iTunes and shift user behavior into downloading music off the Internet, albeit legally.

Apple’s official website with the Press Release of the campaign. Notice the stark design difference from now?

The television ad campaign was set to Green Day’s cover of ‘I Fought the Law’, originally penned by American country singer Sonny Curtis and performed by his band The Crickets.

As in-the-face as the song choice was, it featured close-ups of kids who had been prosecuted in real life for illegal file-sharing, bannered with words like ‘ incriminated’, ‘ accused’, and ‘ busted’ in convict-style fonts.

Check out the 45-second Ad clip right here 👇🏻

https://youtu.be/0yYlgPD6hX0

What was the result of it?

The Campaign flopped big time 👎🏻

Pepsi dropped the ball when “yellow-capped bottles with the Apple song codes were late in reaching some key markets,” according to CNET.

One of the observers of the entire campaign said:

“The promotion was completely hindered by Pepsi’s inability to get bottles out in the market.

I didn’t see one bottle in Los Angeles until about two weeks ago, and I hear they were having similar problems in New York.

This must be driving Steve CRAZY, having to rely on Pepsi’s infrastructure only to have it fail so spectacularly.”

Steve Jobs had previously dealt with Pepsi when he hired its CEO John Sculley to run Apple

Apart from the supply chain issues, there was a big design flaw in the caps of the Pepsi bottles.

By simply walking into a store, grabbing a bottle from the fridge cabinet, and angling it against the light, one could read the code without having to buy the bottle, and download the music for free!

Hacks like these became viral over the internet pretty quickly

This trick became common knowledge and word quickly spread, ironically over the Internet.

A report by CNN notes:

Jon Gales, who runs Macintosh-user site MacMerc.com, posted instructions this week on how to look into sealed Pepsi bottles and figure out which ones carry winning iTunes codes in their caps.

“With luck, you should be able to see under the cap, It takes a few minutes to get used to the angle… and you may have to twist the bottle.”

When the 2 billion-dollar companies discovered that people did not really need to buy Pepsi bottles to get their free music, and even then only around 5 Million songs were downloaded against the projected figure of 100 million, they decided to abandon the campaign.

Usually, Super Bowl Ads are huge in America 🇺🇸

Some viewers especially wait for the commercial break, and major brands plan their campaigns months in advance, with 30-second spots going for millions of dollars in sponsored air-time.

However, the 2004 Super Bowl would remain known for the infamous half-time show of Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson, and the New England Patriots winning their second Super Bowl with Tom Brady as their Quarterback 🏈

Sadly for Pepsi and Apple, getting free music off soft-drink bottle caps is nowhere to be associated with it 🤷‍♂️

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Originally published at https://incentify.substack.com.