Oprah Gives Away 270 New Cars

The richest woman in the U.S. had her season premiere on TV today and she gave away a new Pontiac to each and everyone in the audience.

The 2005 G6s were loaded and valued at $28,000. It was clever how she did the giveaway but the best part was when she took the entire audience to an adjacent lot and they actually retrieved their car.

According to the wire services, the cars were donated by Pontiac but Oprah paid the tax and license on each vehicle.

It was an amazing moment in television!

/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wow.gif gave away 270 new cars?!!?

Publicity stunt my friends. It's one thing for Pontiac to give away 500 cars through it's dealer network, but quite another for Pontiac to give away 270 on national TV.

Still awesome though. I don't know all the technicalities, but apparently the audience wasn't just random people, it was people who's friends and family said they desprately needed a new car.

It is clever how it went down though! 11 people were called up and given cars, than everybody in the audience was given a gift box. They were told that 12 of the boxes contained keys to 12 more cars. Everybody was told to open their box at exactly the same time when (drumroll please) they found that EVERYBODY had won.

*EDIT*
Correction. She had given away 11 cars and there was supposed to only be 1 more to give out, for an even dozen.

** er.. Nevermind. If you don't have something nice to say....

I just feel compelled to reinforce the fact that the reputed richest woman in America did NOT purchase any automobiles and give them away. Ponitiac donated them in a promotion of their new model. This cost them about as much as a full-fledged ad campaign on Super Bowl Sunday would. Oprah may be a generous person in other ways, but not as generous as the headlines are crediting her for.

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Darell said:
** er.. Nevermind. If you don't have something nice to say....

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Too bad it wasn't 270 Scions? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

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BF Hammer said:
This cost them about as much as a full-fledged ad campaign on Super Bowl Sunday would.

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Way, way, WAY less than a Super Bowl ad would cost. And the distribution is proving to be FAR wider. You simply can't buy advertising like this. My local paper wrote that even the registration was picked up by the car maker as well. Not sure who paid for what... not that it really matters.