Have you checked the expiration dates on the items in your medicine cabinet lately? Those pain relief pills won’t last forever.
Advil is encouraging you to refresh your supply, to weed out the medicine that’s outdated and no longer effective. But before you toss those years-old pills into the trash, snap a photo with your phone – and exchange those expired meds for a coupon you can redeem for a more-effective replacement.
The newly-launched “Advil Exchange” program is the latest creative way a company has come up with to promote its product, offer coupons and prompt you to update your stash.
“For the first time, consumers can turn expired pain solutions into savings,” Advil has announced. Calling it “a seamless way to clear out outdated products and upgrade to smarter relief,” the program offers you savings as a way to ensure you have something that works the next time pain strikes.
When you visit the Advil Exchange website on a mobile device, you’ll be prompted to scan the expiration date on an out-of-date pain product. Once you do, you’ll unlock a $3 coupon off the purchase of an Advil product, 18-count or higher.
The cheapest qualifying Advil product at Walmart currently costs $4.28 – so the discount equals a significant 70% savings.
Advil estimates that the average person has more than a dozen outdated or unused medications at home. “When pain strikes, many people operate on ‘autopilot,’ reaching for whatever is already in their medicine cabinet – even if those products are expired,” the company explains. This results in “an ‘expired’ approach to pain management and potentially reduced, unreliable relief.”
The campaign is the latest creative, interactive way to engage shoppers beyond simply giving away a discount. Last year, Hellmann’s launched a coupon program to promote its mayonnaise, by inviting people to “cash in your ketchup packets.” Program participants just needed to take a photo of any takeout ketchup packets they had at home, to virtually “exchange” them for a coupon redeemable for its “superior” condiment.
Dairy Queen’s Canadian division launched a mobile “Falling Treats” campaign last fall, in which fans could scan a fallen maple leaf and transform it into a digital coupon for a DQ frozen treat. The goal of the campaign was to boost ice cream sales as the weather turned cold, by getting potential customers engaged in a fun activity rather than just pushing coupons at them.
And Ziploc won a prestigious advertising prize last year for its “Preserved Promos” campaign. That effort allowed shoppers to “extend the life” of their expired food coupons, by uploading an image of an expired offer to transform it into a coupon for a Ziploc product that would help preserve their food in the future. That promo involved a complex system in which text and image recognition were used to validate that scanned coupons were for actual food items, and were actually expired.
Advil’s promo is somewhat less complex. The Advil Exchange site doesn’t seem to mind if your photo shows an expired date stamp, or even if the date is from a pain relief product. And if you don’t have any expired products, you can hit the “skip to savings” button to bypass the photo-taking process and get straight to the coupon.
The coupon comes in the form of a RevTrax-powered digital offer redeemable only at Walmart, Dollar General, Kroger, Albertsons, Food Lion, Family Dollar, Safeway, Meijer, Walgreens, CVS or Giant Eagle. Those are the only retailers capable of accepting the offer, by scanning a special bar code off your phone’s screen. Once you earn the coupon, you’ll have two weeks to redeem it. The program ends in mid-May.
Advil calls it “the most satisfying spring‑clean moment: restocks.” And by offering effective, unexpired medicine while saving you money, Advil hopes to make your springtime painless – in more ways than one.
