So Mountain Dew was running their "GET IN THE HOUSE" contest until February 28, 2002. I opened a cap of the stuff and looked on the bottom of it. Sometimes they give away free bottles in contests like this and I always look, on the off chance that I might have won FREE CAFFEINE. I noticed it said something other than "Sorry! Please try again!" and I looked closer.

KENNEDY HOME DESIGN CENTER $500

And I said, "Wow. Cool. A home design center. Don't know what the hell I could do with that... or what it really is, but, hey! It's worth $500! I won something! Neat!" I thought maybe I'd won a drafting table or something, which is kinda cool. I like to draw from time to time.

Upon looking inside the label however, I see this, "500 dollars toward Home Design Center with new home purchase."

... what!?

Basically the equivalent of "You've won... NOTHING!" I'd won a coupon. I'd won a chance for someone to advertise all over me. I picked through the sticky feeling left by corporate ejaculant and tried to get something out of my experience by analyzing this. So Mountain Dew, i.e. the conglomerate PEPSICO, owner of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, among others, had made a deal with some company called Kennedy Home Design to promote their products through a cheap contest prize.

I started to worry about the people in the marketing department at Mountain Dew who are obviously a little backwards when it comes to demographics. You see, most of the people I know who drink Mountain Dew are stoner, hippy kids, or teenagers, or college students. Mountain Dew is marketed toward teenagers and young twenty-somethings, with wild sports ads and nutty nonsense like, "DO THE DEW." In short...most people who drink Mountain Dew aren't exactly in the market for some real estate. How many people, I wonder, will open that cap and go, "Oh yes! Kennedy Home Design Center! $500 toward home design center with purchase of new home. Yes! This will be just the thing for my new house. I didn't know it, but now I do! I need a home design center and now I saved 500 dollars, WAHOO!"

reaches over to take a bong hit.

"Yeaaah! HOME DESIGN CENTER!"

Yeah. Exactly.

Just another piece of evidence that advertising and underhanded deception of consumers are growing ever closer to fornicating fission in a glorious, terrible fuck, producing a bastard child that will end the world as we know it.

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