Have a Coke and a Debit Card

Have a Coke and a Debit Card

Have a Coke and a Debit Card

Coca-Cola may be spending tens of millions of dollars on its new "Incredible Summer" advertising campaign, but the biggest bang for its marketing buck is sure to come from cash prizes that winners will collect via single-use ATM cards. Tucked into random 12- and 24-packs and promised under bottle caps, about 450,000 debit cards valued at a combined US$10 million to $15 million will be given away during the blitz to underscore the message that nothing goes better with summer than the fun and freedom money can buy - and, of course, Coke.

Come June this year, 16 new broadcast ads will hit the airwaves and the cash giveaways will begin. Coca-Cola has teamed up with MasterCard to create the new "ATM money cards" - touted as the first disposable debit cards. Bearers of the cards will be able to draw $20, $40, or $100 from any ATM machine that accepts MasterCard. The collectible cards, printed with the smiling sun logo of the "Incredible Summer" campaign, will show the amount won and the PIN number to access the funds.

The technology for this year's giveaway, running 9 June to 28 August, is the latest witness to the fact that giving away money isn't as easy as it seems. Several years ago Coke had to pull the plug on its "Magic Can" promotion, when the mechanism that was supposed to pop dollar bills out of random cans failed. "Ever since then, there's been an itch around here to give away cash," said Coca-Cola spokesman Scott Jacobson.

MasterCard declined to describe this summer's more promising technology, other than to say it "utilizes current magnetic-stripe technology and is not a stored-value card." Leslie Card, director of communication plans and programs at MasterCard, said a special account will be set up specifically for the promotion, and the money will be accessed just as it is from a normal bank account.

"It's certainly a novelty," said Scott Smith, director of the digital commerce group at Jupiter Communications. "It sounds like a stop-gap measure until smartcard technology makes all sorts of promotions possible."

Smartcards, with an 8-K or 16-K memory chip cost around $5, making them prohibitively expensive as single-use cards, and Karen Epper, an analyst in the money and technology strategies group at Forrester Research, pointed out that debit cards cost a fraction of that. "As smartcards come into vogue, you're going to see mag-stripe cards becoming disposable," she said.

MasterCard itself owns a 51 percent share in the ecash pioneer Mondex International.

The newer technology which will store changeable values on cards is expected to hit the market as early as year's end, and there is already talk of creating giveaway downloads of cash prizes or frequent-flier miles to encourage online shopping with them.

But MasterCard declined to say whether the unveiling of a smartcard would change plans for future promotions like Coke's that use the throwaway ATM cards. "We're going to watch the success of this program before we consider what's next," she added.