Half-Price Dining: Buy Gift Cards from TV Stations

Written on January 26th, 2009 at 4:48 pm by Joe

giftcard 300x162 Half Price Dining: Buy Gift Cards from TV Stations We all like to go out for dinner, but let’s face it, it’s not exactly cheap. Now you can buy restaurant gift cards, sometimes at half their value, to pay for your meal.

Everyone knows that you can pay less for your restaurant dinners by using coupons. But then again, the most popular restaurants rarely offer such coupons either because it makes them look cheap or because they don’t feel they need to offer any additional discounts to get customers. Even if you do find a coupon for a restaurant you like, you may feel too embarrassed to actually use it. Let’s be honest, it kind of makes you look cheap too. The stigma is mutual.

However, there’s absolutely no stigma attached to using gift cards in a restaurant. By using a discount gift card, you can save on your meal without feeling embarrassed.

You may be asking yourself where you can buy these discounted gift cards. One way is to search your local Craigslist, but then again you might encounter counterfeiters and gift card thieves. Gift card fraud is much more common that you think. Go ahead and do a little internet search on this topic and you will see for yourself.

Another option would be your local warehouse club like Costco or Sam’s Club. For example, my Costco sells $100 gift cards to a number of local restaurants for about $80. If you’re not feeling impressed by this 20% discount, neither am I. And it’s not just because you need a membership just in order to be able to purchase these gift cards. The discount is simply not enough. You want more and you deserve more.

A better alternative is to buy gifts cards from a local TV or radio station. These stations offer discounts of as much as 50% on gift cards to local restaurants. The reason they can do this is because they are in partnership with the restaurants. The station introduces the restaurant and the gift card promotion in a “Dining Deal of the Week” type segment. The restaurant gets free advertising and more customers while the station receives free content to fill up airtime.

In fact, these types of partnerships have become so popular that there are two major companies now that help facilitate them nationwide: Media WebConnect and incentRev. And they don’t just offer restaurant gift cards. You can get discounts on other things as well.

To check whether your local TV and radio stations offer gift cards, you can do one of two things:

First, you could just visit their websites. If the gift card deal is on the front page, this can rather quick.

Second, you can do an online search to check whether your local stations work together with either Media WebConnect or incentRev. Simply go to Google and search for the name of your city followed by :incentrev.com or mediawebconnect.com (e.g. new york:incentrev.com, newyork:mediawebconnect.com). Alternatively, if you know the call letters of your local station, you could also try entering the web address directly in the following format: letters.mediawebconnect.com (e.g. xetv.mediawebconnect.com) or letters.incentrev.com (e.g. xetv.incentrev.com). If you want to find out what the call letters of your local stations are, you can use this website to look them up. Needless to say, doing the Google search should be a lot faster.

Update: I put together a list of stations in major cities. See below.

Atlanta

http://atlantahalfoff.mediawebconnect.com/

http://wstr4.mediawebconnect.com/

http://wstr3.mediawebconnect.com/

Anchorage

http://nnbaa.incentrev.com/

Boston

http://cbwma.incentrev.com/

http://wbmx.mediawebconnect.com/

http://wbcn.mediawebconnect.com/

Charlotte