D.I.Y. Rewards?

Design It Yourself, that's part of the catch behind Marlboro's recent reward program. Sometimes being on email lists and mailing lists can be a huge pain, it's really something I don't recommend for people without much experience in knowing how to skim through those obtrusively long fine print documents but if you can put up with it sometimes it pays off.

Marlboro has some pretty good incentives for people who qualify and sign up for their lists. Besides constant coupons etc. every so often along comes a nice little reward like the one I received in the mail not too long ago:


This T-shirt is simple enough but it's exactly what I wanted... the rewards program allowed you to chose your initials, size them, place them and then add any of the additional elements pre-designed by Marlboro wherever you wanted them, if you wanted them. I kept things simple, just my initials but it was what I wanted and even better than that it was totally, 100% free. No charge for the shirt, the design or the delivery. A big padded envelope with a nice big T I designed? Yes please.

Out of hibernation

Holidays have a magical way about them... of eating up time I had planned to use to post about recent winnings.

Marlboro sent out the free T-shirt I put in for, the lovely folks over at Wendy's sent out both the $5 Wendy's gift card as well as the $10 Home Depot gift card that I won through 2 different contests of theirs.

I shall update this post with photos and specific info sometime in the next few days.

I finally reached my ticket goal on Microsoft's Club Bing and turned in for an immersion blender. More info on that to come as well.

Biggest win over the holidays - started seeing an excellent woman. Cheesy? Yes. Don't care, she's great.

The Ghost of Wins Past (Part 1)

In the first visit of "wins from the past" is actually one of my "biggest" wins:

I've tried my best to make use of all my wins, either using it myself or handing it off to a friend or family member (seriously, everyone likes free) but every now and then there comes something that just doesn't fit. When that happens there's always our good ol' buddy eBay.

Earlier this year Marlboro ran their "Find Your Frontier" Sweepstakes - free to enter (as are all the sweeps I ever enter) they offered a great number of kind of frontier themed prizes; grills, sunglasses, golf clubs, tools, tents and my win... binoculars.

I didn't receive any notification that I had won (as far as I know... one hazard to "sweeping" you have to have a junk email account that you sort of watch sort of trash daily) but all of the sudden a fairly large box showed up on my door. "Marlboro? What the heck am I getting mail from Marlboro for?" The inside of the box was red as can be and there, neatly tucked away was the first "big" win I'd ever won a pair of Canon 10 x 30 Image Stabilizing Binoculars. They had some weight to them and being a photography man myself I knew weighty lenses were often good lenses.

Still, what use did I have for binoculars? At the time I lived in West Philadelphia not exactly a bird watching part of the country. I jumped on the computer, did a little search and found that these had an ARV (Average Retail Value) of near $500.

At the time I wasn't set up to sell on eBay just yet and the site was flooded with the buggers anyway (Marlboro gave away 50 of them surely I wasn't the only one selling mine) so I held on to it and sold them just this past week for $275 bucks plus shipping. The buyer got a fair deal on them and I get something much more useful to me - cold hard cash.

Thank you Mr. Marlboro Man.