Score Half-Price Meals Courtesy of Your Local TV Station [Deals]

Sent to you via Google Reader

Score Half-Price Meals Courtesy of Your Local TV Station [Deals]

In the strange-but-true category of thriftiness: it's quite possible your local TV station is sitting on a pile of restaurant gift-certificates that could be yours for a steal

You can buy heavily discounted restaurant gift-certificates from your local TV station to restaurants in your area.. Cheap meals courtesy of Channel 5 News? What? Paul Michael from the financial blog Wise Bread did some investigating after his wife was tipped off this the gift certificate/TV station relationship and found it was entirely legitimate. As explained by Stephanie Riegal of BusinessReport.com:

The company that came up with the concept is the Cleveland-based IncentRev, and it's a coupon broker that facilitates the on-air promotions. Essentially, it works like this: A retailer—say, a new restaurant—"buys" exclusive air time with the station in exchange for 100 gift certificates, which the station then promotes on air for half-price. Viewers can buy the gift certificates on a first-come, first-serve basis by accessing the station's Web site. All parties involved say it's a win-win arrangement. Viewers get a bargain. A small retailer essentially receives free advertising. And IncentRev, which does all the paperwork, and the station split the money.

The only catch seems to be that as the deals become better known, the certificates are harder to come by. You can search for certificates by plugging in the call letters for the local station into the URL for IncentRev, like so: http://XXXX.incentrev.com where XXXX is the call letters. You can also search for deals in your city or state by flexing a little google-fu and using search terms like site:incentrev.com new york. Photo by Wolfgang Staudt.

How to Get Half-Price Dining from your Local TV Station [Wisebread]

Sent from my iPhone