There is no denying that contests and incentive programs are great ways for a business to promote their product, and almost everyone of us at sometime participated in one: be it registering for a door prize at a grand opening, using a frequent shopper cards to earn free CD's or books, or stealing 5,000 copies of The Tartan to play McDonald's Monopoly game. Yet some businesses come up with some of the most inane, asinine promotions, ones that while you may actually win a prize, you lose your dignity in the process. Here are a few.

Planters
The Planters company, in addition to making peanuts, also markets a line of cheese products, like cheesy curls and cheesy balls (a word of warning: stay away from the Planters White Cheddar Cheese Balls. Trust me on this one). The company also sponsors the Dale Jarrett NASCAR Racing Team. Well, someone in the home office thought up of a great way to help promote Planters cheese products: give away a piece of Dale Jarrett's race car. The ad shows Jarrett in a tug of war with Jane Q. Fake Plastic Public over the passenger side door. Who knows what part of the car will actually be given away? Yet the look on Slack Jawed Yokel's face when he finds out it's actually a spark plug or something that he's winning instead of the door will be priceless.

Famous Amos Cookies
I have to wonder what the guys in the advertising department were smoking when they came up with this one. It must have been good whatever it was. Anyway, in the "Famous Amos Taste of Fame Sweepstakes," 25 winners will be featured on a Famous Amos billboard in their hometown. There's nothing I would like more than to be coming into some town, looking up and seeing Henrietta Housewife and her big gap-toothed smile saying something along the lines of: "Hi! I'm Henrietta Housewife! I play bingo at the Rotary Club, support my local high school football team, believe whatever I'm told in church on Sunday and have now pimped myself out to corporate America. Just doing my part in spoiling the scenic beauty of America's landscape! Enjoy your stay!" In addition, one of the neophyte celebrities will win a trip to Hollywood, I guess to let the fame and the glamour of it all go his/her head even more.

The Expasy Molecular Biology Server
Talk about anti-climatic. Go to this web site and answer some molecular biology questions. If you get a perfect score, you're entered into a drawing to win...some Swiss chocolate.

Caress Body Wash
If you're the lucky winner of this contest, you get to fly to the offices of Glamour magazine and be a "DO" in their "Do and Don't" fashion section. Then you get to go to bed at night with the knowledge that you helped make young women all over America feel even more conscious about the way they look.

Nine Lives Cat Food
This isn't a contest, but it's an incentive program in which you save up points, called "Morris Marks," and trade them in for merchandise. Before I go on, let me say that I have participated in such programs before, eagerly clipping the Flag Points off my G.I. JOE packages and swapping them in for a Cobra Commander figure. And I'm not ashamed to admit that. Anyway, these "Morris Marks" can be traded in for a variety of Morris merchandise, such as shirts, mugs, feed bowls and so on. Yet if you save up 8,000 Morris Marks, you earn a trip to see Morris himself. The mere idea of buying hundreds of dollars in cat food just to go see a cat that just, well, lays there and purrs is nothing short of ignorant.

Imagine this:

Billy Brick in the Wall: "So Morris, how's it going?"
Morris: Meow?
BBIW: "That's good. So how about them Mets?"
Morris: Meow meow? Purrr.

That would be about the extent of it right there. If you're going to meet someone famous, make it someone who will be stimulating in one way or the other. Like Al Gore. Or Anna Kournikova.