Text Your Way To A Better Life
This post was originally published on August 9, 2007. Shortly thereafter, it was retracted due to a gleaming error caught by James, which has been corrected in the revised version below.
During a commercial break on last Wednesday’s episode of The Colbert Report, a company named Bid4Prizes had a brief ad offering different prizes for sending a text message to the provided number.
The three prizes are as follows:
- Text “R” to 81000 for a chance to win a new iPhone!
- Text “S” to 81000 for a chance to win a 50″ Plasma TV!
- Text “T” to 81000 for a chance to win $10,000 in cash!
Teh Moneys
If we consider the monetary values of each prize at the time the commercial aired:
| Prize | Cost |
|---|---|
| new iPhone | $500 - 600 ( does not include service) |
| 50″ Plasma TV | $1,300 |
| $10,000 | $10,000 |
Clearly there’s a disparity between the true values of the prizes, but I can only wonder what the perceived values are — and the only people who know that data are the Bid4Prizes goons who receive the text messages, and laugh their way to the bank with the $9.99/month subscription fee.
Text Message Steganography
One might ask why the options are R, S, and T, rather than A, B, and C — why start in the middle of the alphabet?
For one, a text message with one of these letters tells Bid4Prizes more than which product enticed you: it tells them which commercial you responded to. For each commercial they air, they use a different set of letters, and thus can correlate responses to the specific channel. In some ways, it is a low-tech mimicry of the web bugs frequently used by hit counters.
(As an aside, I wonder which channel has the largest number of suckers in its audience.)
From this it might follow that there are 8 possible commercials given unique letter combinations: ABC DEF GHI JKL MNO PQR STU VWX. However, you’ll notice that RST does not fit — it’s somewhere between commercials 6 and 7.
To be honest, I was fairly disappointed about this because I thought it ruined my hypothesis, until I realized I could apply a trick commonly used in serial number algorithms: because I and O can be easily mistaken for 0 and 1, Bid4Prizes likely dropped the letters from its alphabet to prevent illegal responses.
This gives us commercial identifiers of ABC DEF GHJ KLM NPQ RST UVW XYZ, in which RST cleanly aligns as commercial number 6. I wonder when the others aired?
October 18th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Do you mean “redacted” or “retracted”? To redact is to edit, and the correcting of the error is mentioned later in the sentence.
Interesting post, though, despite that because no conclusions are drawn, I don’t quite see the point of it all.
October 18th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Nice catch on the mistake.
My original error was an extremely stupid mistake in saying that RST all encode to the same numeric value, so they wouldn’t be able to decipher which prize you wanted at the other end. Obviously, in a phone number this would be true, but in a text message it’s not.
I notice that the prizes are in ascending order by value. Perhaps they’re hoping that someone will send an R when they meant T…