For years, we’ve watched come-on commercials attached to fabulous prizes: Buy a six-pack of beer, batteries or baking soda and win a home stereo unit. Sign up to win a Caribbean vacation! Win a motor home! A trip to the Super Bowl! A trip around the world!
Funny, though, if people are actually winning these prizes, how come we never hear about it? How come, if everything’s on the up-and-up, the makers of the products aren’t as eager to tell us who won as they are to use the prizes as bait?
How many times have we seen the follow-up ad? “And remember that contest we at Stove’s End Pudding and Pie Stuffings held to win a brand new kitchen, valued at $30,000? Well, the winner was Mrs. Florence Mulhearn of Yakima, Washington!”
For every, oh, 1,000 contests pitched to us in TV ads, how many times have we been shown the winners?
To that end, a new MasterCard commercial appeared last week, expensive contest prizes attached. The prize specifically displayed and demonstrated in this ad were twin Pontiac Solstice sports cars – his and hers automobiles. Not bad.
Not that I don’t trust a credit card company, but I want to see, in time, who won. And if no one won, I want to see that, too, and hear why.
Heck, MasterCard seemed very excited to be giving the cars away; it should be equally excited to tell us who won, right? Right? (I can even envision a cable network dedicated to announcing the winners of TV contests.)
Then again, perhaps I’m just a bit cynical when it comes to corporations that claim to give things away. Heck, more than two years later, I’m still waiting for Ticketmaster to make full disclosure on a promise it made in the wake of a disaster.
Three weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the Giants were scheduled to play in New Orleans, which was so devastated that the game was moved to Giants Stadium, where it was presented by the NFL as the “Katrina Relief Game.” Everybody contributed. The cost of the tickets, for example, was donated. Everyone was in, except Ticketmaster, which sold the tickets, tacking on a $10.30 per ticket “convenience fee.”
After feeling heat about profiting from a charity game and a disaster, Ticketmaster caved. It too, would donate its take with the exception of a “small percentage” – no more than $1 per ticket – to cover the cost of credit card transactions. Ticketmaster, better late than never, would do the right thing.
The announced paid crowd for that game, Sept. 19, 2005, was 68,031. The vast majority of the tickets – conservatively 50,000 – were sold by Ticketmaster. If we subtract $1 per ticket to cover Ticketmaster’s credit card transactions, Ticketmaster’s donation to Katrina Relief would be in the neighborhood of $500,000. And if Ticketmaster made such a donation, it stood to reason that it wouldn’t be shy to tell everyone.
But four months later, then 15 months later, when we asked a second time, Ticketmaster refused to say how much it had donated and to whom. A Ticketmaster spokesperson told me that the company is “contractually unable to disclose the donation location of the assets,” adding that such info is confidential in keeping with “client agreements. However, our full donation was made.”
Translation: It’s none of your business. As for “client agreements,” Ticketmaster’s clientele, first and foremost, is the public, those who purchase tickets from the company, and in the case of that football game, purchased tickets attached to a charitable cause and come-on.
To this day, 28 months later, I’m still waiting for Ticketmaster to show me – us – that I’m wrong, that it didn’t profit from a charitable endeavor and from a cataclysmic natural disaster, that it donated roughly $500,000 – or even $250,000 – of its take from that game to Katrina Relief.
It’s kind of like these win-fabulous-prizes TV ad come-ons. The ads are designed for us to get excited and to get in on it, but the winner, if there is a winner, apparently is none of our business.