Outside the Beltway

Pepsi iTunes Promotion

James Joyner · Thursday, February 19, 2004 · 2 comments

Jeff Jarvis just watched a commercial he found amusing:

I’m watching TV tonight and see an early-teenage girl in front of a Mac, drinking a Pepsi, saying, “Hi, I was one of the kids who was arrested for downloading music free off the Internet.” Cue slug of Pepsi. She says she’s still downloading music free thanks to the Pepsi iTunes promotion (while, in the background, we hear, “I fought the law and the law won”). There’s the first and only attempt I’ve seen by the music industry to make its customers look like friends. Only it didn’t come from the music industry. It came from the soft drink and technology industries. Oh, well.

Indeed. Although, since Pepsi presumably paid for the right to offer the service, no law is being violated here. And, amusingly, some web entrepreneur has posted instructions for exploiting weaknesses in Pepsi’s contest system to ensure only buying “winning” bottles. Which is rather ironic, given that Pepsi is attempting to make a profit exploiting the failure of the music industry to protect its product from unauthorized copying.