You won’t be able to fit this coupon into your wallet. But if you happen to see one on the side of a building, on a passing truck, or being pulled by an airplane, all you have to do is scan it to save on a bag of frozen fries.
It will also help if you happen to be in Canada. That’s where McCain Foods is launching its larger-than-life promotion, introducing “jumbo coupons” in several major cities to help mark the introduction of the company’s new Jumbo Crinkle Fries.
“To match a Superfries innovation this big (literally), McCain wanted to do something equally colossal to introduce them,” the company announced this morning. So billboards, trucks and plane banners are among the surfaces being turned into supersized coupons. “No more scrolling past that web coupon or accidentally tossing those flyers into the recycling – these jumbo coupons are impossible to ignore,” the company proclaimed.
For the next month, the coupons will appear “in unique places” across Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The giant banners feature a QR code that, once scanned, takes you to a website where you can enter your information for a PromotionPod-powered $2.50 printable coupon, or a chance to receive a coupon by mail for a free bag of Jumbo Crinkle Fries, twice the size of McCain’s regular fries. (The airplane banner features a web address only, since it’s difficult to scan a QR code when that sucker keeps moving around.)
Of course, if you don’t live in any of those cities, or don’t want to wait to find one of these giant coupons in the wild, you can just go directly to the website mccainjumbocoupons.ca to get your coupon (redeemable in Canadian stores only). But what’s the fun in that?
Offering giant coupons is certainly attention-getting. But it’s not unheard of. McCain’s “jumbo coupon” may be jumbo, but it’s nothing like the record-setting coupon that the fast food chain Jack in the Box unveiled back in 2015. That 80-foot-tall, 25-foot-wide coupon for the restaurant’s Buttery Jack burger was hung on the side of a building in Los Angeles. In that case, all people had to do was take a photo of the coupon in order to redeem it in store.
And just to confirm its status as a legitimate coupon, a group of Jack in the Box fans first carried it to the drive-thru of a local restaurant to redeem it, before hanging it up for all to see, and use. That was enough to get Guinness World Records’ attention and certify it as the world’s largest coupon.
A couple of years earlier, a KFC franchise in South Carolina inadvertently offered a giant coupon that it ended up honoring. The restaurant owner put up what was described as a tongue-in-cheek billboard, inviting passersby to “bring in this billboard for a free KFC bucket,” never imagining that someone actually would. But after a storm blew the billboard advertisement down, a local couple grabbed it, brought it to the restaurant to redeem it, and got their free chicken bucket.
In the case of McCain’s jumbo coupon, actual possession of a physical coupon itself is not required to get your discount. But the company hopes its supersized promotion gets some supersized publicity for its new product. “When it came time to introduce our latest innovation to the portfolio, Jumbo Crinkle Fries, we knew we had to do something big,” McCain Foods Canada Marketing Director Michael Embir said in a statement.
So if you live in Canada, keep your eyes open for a giant coupon on a building, on a truck or in the sky near you. If you’re not Canadian, here’s wishing you big savings anyway – with normal-sized coupons.
Image source: McCain Foods Canada
