Starbucks is giving free coffee tomorrow to anyone that votes. I saw the ad on tv last night and was really captivated by it. It’s subtle and powerful and drew me in enough to watch the whole ad. I didn’t know until the end who or what was being advertised and was pleasantly surprised when all was revealed. I’m definitely going to claim my free cup tomorrow with pride.

Although I’m giving Starbucks a B- on the viralness of the ad. Since they only have about 36 hours to get this message out they should pull out all the ‘sharing’ guns they can find. They have a great engagement ad running on Facebook today (shown here). In the Event Engagement Ad people can rsvp for an event and then see others in their network that are planning to attend. As you see here I rsvp’ed and a few of the people in my network did so I can see who else is going. Love this. Great way to tell your network and spread the word. Engagement ads get an A.

I went to their own website hoping the get the commercial embed link so I could post it here on my blog. They are running the ad on the top hero slot but there is no embed code, so I can’t post it on my blog. They also don’t have any sharing features next to the ad to make it easy for me to tell all my friends they can get a free cup of coffee too. The first thing I want to do when I hear you can get something for free is tell all my peeps. Starbucks.com  doesn’t enable any of that sharing.  Starbucks.com gets a D.

One other beef I have with Starbucks.com is they don’t have a virtual map. Maybe I’ve never been to Starbucks before and I say to myself I want to try them today since it’s free. Where do I go? I know in some places like Seattle it’s a complete no brainer, they are everywhere. But I travel a fare bit and know they aren’t everywhere in every city. With services like Live Maps it’s very easy to do.  Would be a great addition.

Get your free coffee tomorrow and VOTE!