Wendy house music

Making a meal of downloads

What?: Wendy’s, the equal-opportunities-for- redheads burger chain, is to give away 100M tracks in a massive promotion with digital music service Rhapsody. Purchasers of a medium or large combo meal will receive a unique code that they can redeem against any of Rhapsody’s catalogue of 4.5M tracks. Customers can also enter a competition, regardless of redemption codes (under the snappy title of Combo Up To Download) for a chance to win a 50-song bundle of free songs or a SanDisk Sansa Rhapsody portable music player. Rhapsody has created a special Wendy’s Radio stream in order to promote the campaign online.

So what?: “You deserve a free download with your juicy hot burger,” say Wendy’s, reaching out to the fast food community in a promotion that apes Coca Cola’s 2B track iTunes giveaway. “I’ve lost my MP3 player under the folds of my bloated belly,” the consumers say back. A single-track promotion seems an odd fit for the burger chain’s predominantly young audience. Is this campaign what they really ‘deserve’?

“The prospect of filling your MP3 player for free is somewhat outweighed by the feeling of your arteries simultaneously filling up with saturated fat. Plus carrying home a greasy segment of carton to redeem one track seems laborious compared to the relative ease and ubiquity of P2P amongst this demographic”
Giles Fitzgerald, Five Eight

www.hotjuicyhits.com