Here’s the deal folks. I’ve been wrestling with the decision to shut down Adjack for months. Friday night, I was in the airport and made the final decision to shut it down. I didn’t have time for a lengthy post, but I wanted to get the information out. With the exception of randomly generating numbers, the site functions normally. You are welcome to continue to comment on and watch your favorite commercials.
For those conspiracy theorists there is no conspiracy. The reason we are shutting down is the same reason we never had more than a Crackajack winner - insufficient usage. To attract national advertising dollars we need to show millions of ads a week. We thought the idea was so compelling we would have millions of users in the first year. But that never happened.
The odds are what they are. We never influenced an outcome of a drawing or otherwise compromised your trust. We just didn’t have enough entries to make it likely someone would win the larger prizes.
We put a tremendous amount of time, effort, and financial resources into making Adjack work. It’s with great sadness that I have to shut the site down. We loved the concept and really did enjoy celebrating the winners. But without advertising dollars, the site is unsustainable. … more
Lorraine Hoey was surprised by how quickly she won on AdJack.
Jim Valdez brought in the New Year in fine style, winning the CrackaJack prize on Friday, January 1, along with another winner.
She has won lots of stuff in her long sweepstakes career, with a $5,000 prize in a cookie sweepstakes standing out in her memory, so Sandy of Portland, Oregon took the December 4 CrackaJack prize she shared with two other winners in stride. She enters about 10 sweepstakes contests a week, but until the end of 2009, her luck had been pretty dry.
Since Tom McMahon of Oradell, New Jersey, bought his TiVo, the only place he willingly watches commercials is on AdJack.
Robert Fencl endured a spate of tough luck in 2009, but hopes his AdJack win on Friday, December 4 is the harbinger of better things to come. He’ll share the $1,000 CrackaJack with two others whose numbers came up that day.
Tom Haddon was poking around on the Internet one day, looking for the E-Trade babies ‘cause they make him laugh, when he came across AdJack.
Klosterman grew up on a farm outside Wyndmere, North Dakota and upon graduating from University of North Dakota, spent several years writing for the Fargo Forum, then the Akron Beacon-Journal in Ohio. Since then, he has written a New York Times bestseller, Downtown Owl, and several other books on pop culture. His latest book, Eating the Dinosaur, covers a wide range of topics including advertising. He’s getting interviewed all over the place, and in case you haven’t read any of them, we bring you a couple of quotes here.
Most Friday nights you’ll find Phyllis Holmberg and her husband, his brother and their sister-in-law at the Biloxi, Mississippi casinos where they meet for dinner and to indulge a little cash in Phyllis’s favorite sport: gambling. When the Holmbergs get back to their house 40 miles away, Phyllis always checks her AdJack numbers, then makes her first entry for the next go ‘round.
Three or four weeks ago Rachel Shahvar of San Francisco started looking on the Internet for risk-free sweepstakes, “something that didn’t cost anything to enter,” she said. In about five minutes she found AdJack near the top of a list of the top one hundred sweepstakes. “I’m in the advertising industry, so I thought, ‘why not? Watch some ads, maybe win some money.’” So she signed on for her first contest ever. On November’s Friday the 13th she checked her numbers, and wham, there they were, matched right up for the $1,000 CrackaJack.
Mikaela Osilaja was looking for good sweeps contests on the Internet one day last summer when AdJack popped up. Some weeks she plays often, and some weeks not at all. The week of September 25 she looked up a few Geiko ads, and voila, she’s $1,000 richer.