This was kind of interesting as I recently received a $10 credit for a store that I haven’t really shopped at in a long time. Essentially it’s like a free gift card to get you into the store. The first thing I thought was how generally with gift cards you tend to spend more than the actual credit that you have as it is highly unlikely that you can find something at that exact price.
Then I was thinking how this was a pretty straight forward way of spending marketing dollars. Instead of paying thousands of dollars in creating ads they simply just gave away thousands of dollars instead. Is it as effective? Kind of hard to say. But I would think that this would be a little safer financially. Basically, if they decide to not use the gift card then all you lost was the cost to make the card. The assumption is that this costs less too compared to say shooting a commercial.