My Coke Rewards

» see mycokerewards.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The currency was garbage. Not a metaphor: the thing that carried value was the inside of a bottle cap, the piece of the product you throw away without looking at it, and Coca-Cola printed a code there and made it worth three points on a website. Cardboard packaging carried larger codes, up to twenty-five points on the wrap around a thirty-two pack.

It launched on 20 February 2006 and Coca-Cola described it at the time as the largest program of its kind in the company's history. You made an account on mycokerewards.com, you typed in codes, you accumulated points, you spent them on merchandise or sweepstakes entries. Codes could also be sent by text message, which mattered in 2006 because a phone was better than a computer for something you were holding in a parking lot.

Over a million prizes had been redeemed by November of the first year. There were tie-ins with Blockbuster and with the Disney pirate films, and multi-use codes handed out through email and magazine advertising for people who were not going to drink their way to a reward.

None of this reached me and it was never going to. The program was North American at the packaging layer, meaning the codes were physically printed on bottles produced for that market, so no amount of interest from anywhere else made a difference. I have looked at plenty of Turkish Coca-Cola caps over the years and there was never a code under one.

~ the dossier ~

~ the code under the cap ~

What Coca-Cola actually built was a data collection instrument wearing a costume. Every code entered ties a purchase to a named account with an address, which turns an anonymous product bought at a counter into a record of who is drinking how much of what, and where. Loyalty schemes at supermarkets do the same thing through a card. This one did it through the packaging itself, which reaches deeper because it survives past the shop.

The Center for Digital Democracy objected on those grounds, arguing the program marketed to children and collected more than it should. That criticism arrived early and did not slow anything down. A weight-loss instructor sued in 2006 and dropped it within weeks, calling her own suit frivolous, which is a rare enough thing for a plaintiff to say that it stayed attached to the story.

~ the caps on the caps ~

The economics only work if the amount of soda a person can drink is bounded, and the program spent eleven years discovering that some people treat bounds as a challenge. At launch you could enter ten codes a day. By 2009 that had become a hundred points a week, and by the final months it was down to seventy-five.

The rewards catalog moved in the same direction. Regular users complained loudly about the price of popular items climbing, and the word people reached for was bait-and-switch, though nothing in the terms had promised a fixed exchange rate. That is the structural problem with a private currency you print yourself: you control the supply and the prices both, so every adjustment you make to protect the budget looks to your best customers like the rules changing after they played.

~ the points became nothing ~

The wind-down was announced in January 2017 and it was orderly. The last day to enter a code was 22 March. You had another three months to spend whatever you were holding, and at 11:59pm eastern on 30 June the program stopped and every unspent point was forfeited. Coca-Cola said it would donate the remaining value to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America and to Junior Achievement, which is a decent thing to do with money that was never really money.

A relaunched coke.com opened the next morning with something new attached to it, eventually the scan-the-code mechanic that most drinks brands run now through a phone camera. The old website redirects there and the email lists and social accounts were shut. What ended on 30 June 2017 was not the idea, since the idea is healthier than ever, but the specific ritual of it: sitting down at a keyboard with a handful of caps and typing twelve characters at a time.

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