Gaming the System

The other day I stumbled across a rant on the Consumerist website where someone was complaining that the new Burger King sweepstakes (they’re giving away the new “Kinect” controller for the Xbox) was recycling the same codes over and over again. For those not familiar with these games, the large drink cups you purchase as part of this promotion each have a supposedly unique code that you type into the game website to see if you’ve won anything. While you’re on the site the company running the game gets the chance to bombard you with ad copy, propaganda (in favor of their food), other offers and anything else they think might induce you to give them more money – which is the point of this exercise, of course, along with getting the customer to buy more $1.79 soft drinks that cost about three cents each. The real issue is why you would need dummy codes…

In the Burger King promotion being discussed the “prize code” is a six-digit alphanumeric, which means that six of them in sequence should yield 36 to the sixth power unique combinations, or 2,176,782,336 unique codes. It is possible that Burger King did, in fact, print that many special promotional drink cups, I suppose, although assuming that you will serve over two billion customers during the short span of the promotional period seems a bit overconfident to me. Even if they did, however, there’s no way two customers should have received the same number – unless they printed up two sets of each code, or somewhere in excess of 4.3 individual “prize code” cups. Even then, the odds of consecutive customers getting the same number should have been 2,176,782,336 to one. What seems more probable is that Burger King printed up however many winning codes actually correspond to all of the prizes they are giving away, and then filled in all of the other “prize code” cups with a few (or even just one) inert codes…

Now, one could legitimately ask what difference this makes to anybody. After all, in any corporate sweepstakes/contest of this type, 11 out of every 12 or 599 out of every 600 or 999,999 out of every million “game pieces” is going to be a dud; what difference does it make if every one of the duds has a unique code or not? That would be true if all you wanted the customers to do was collect codes or tokens or whatever (in addition to buying your product); the difficulty here is that Burger King also wants customers to go to their website and be exposed to advertising material – and nobody is going to go look up the same code they got the last three times, or which their buddy got in the previous order. Even worse, in this case, is that you can also text your code numbers to see if you’ve won anything (incurring text charges a fees, of course) – which means that Burger King is effectively telling their customers that it believes they are stupid enough to spend money verifying “prize” codes they already know are duds…

I’m not picking on Burger King here, even though the workers at my local store are so inept that they occasionally leave the top half of the bun off certain products; McDonald’s pulled a similar stunt with the “Free Entry” code for their last Monopoly™ game (it was the same code every time), and they also had to end their last iteration of the game three weeks early because they had already run out of prizes. My point here is that any sweepstakes or game is really just another advertizing gimmick, and like any other gimmick, it won’t work if it ends up costing you more in prizes, lawsuits or offended customers than you make on increased traffic, advertising sales or kickbacks from wireless service providers…