Oprah car giveaway

[TB4000]

Oprah Winfrey Gives Cars to Audience

Mon Sep 13, 4:18 PM ET

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CHICAGO - Oprah Winfrey celebrated the premiere of her 19th season by surprising each of her 276 audience members with a new car.





"We're calling this our wildest dream season, because this year on the Oprah show, no dream is too wild, no surprise too impossible to pull off," Winfrey said on the show that aired Monday.
Winfrey said the audience members were chosen because their friends or family had written about their need for a new car. One woman's young son said she drove a car that "looks like she got into a gunfight"; another couple had almost 400,000 miles on their two vehicles.

Making sure the audience was kept in suspense, Winfrey opened the show by calling 11 people onto the stage. She gave each of them a car — a Pontiac G6.

She then had gift boxes distributed to the rest of the audience and said one of the boxes contained keys to a 12th car. But when everyone opened the boxes, each had a set of keys.

"Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car!" Winfrey yelled as she jumped up and down on the stage.

The audience screamed, cried and hugged each other — then followed Winfrey out to the parking lot of her Harpo Studios to see their Pontiacs, all decorated with giant red bows.
The cars, which retail for $28,000, were donated by Pontiac.

"A little idea grew into a big idea," Mary Henige of Pontiac told The Associated Press.

She added that Pontiac will pay for the taxes and the customizing of the cars.
In other segments on the show, taped Thursday, Winfrey surprised a 20-year-old girl who had spent years in foster care and homeless shelters with a four-year college scholarship, a makeover and $10,000 in clothes. And a family with eight foster children who were going to be kicked out of their house were given $130,000 to buy and repair the home.

"The Oprah Winfrey Show," which debuted in 1986, is syndicated to 212 domestic markets and 109 countries.

http://www.canadiandriver.com/news/04images/05g6_1.jpg

[missmeow]

Goddamn, I needa get tickets to that show!

[applehead]

oh shit.
i love watching oprah's christmas
shows when she gives away her favorite
things and you see the audience
going crazy and crying.
you can literally see the greed in their
eyes. it's scary.

[truMp]

"Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car!" Winfrey yelled as she jumped up and down on the stage.


haha, she acts psycho a lot. I can imagine her going crazy in that situation.

[Faithless]

She is the best.

I think she could easily win a run for a political office based on name alone.

And old article on her --

Why Oprah stands out as the Person of the Year (http://www.detnews.com/2004/editorial/0401/02/a09-24238.htm)
Despite her success, the first African-American female billionaire has helped others improve their lives without seeking publicity for her generosity. She wouldn't want it any other way

By Jesse Jackson

I have a nomination for Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” award. Surely, one of the most extraordinary success stories of the century, much less the year, is Oprah Winfrey. Time, of course, might consider the award redundant, since she’s already been on the cover of the magazine and already been named as one of the Time 100, honoring the most influential people of the century.

Oprah keeps on growing. This year, Forbes Magazine included her in its list of billionaires, the first African-American female ever. But it isn’t simply where you got that counts, it is where you started from. And Oprah’s journey is beyond belief.

...

She created the Oprah Winfrey Foundation, which has given literally hundreds of millions of dollars to help deprived children reach their potential. The scope of her concerns and her creativity are astounding.

In South Africa, she contributed $1 million to create a residence for the students of Cida City Campus, South Africa’s first free college. Poor students flocked to it from across the country, but had to scramble to pay for their own room and board. Oprah’s grant helped thousands make it through.

She endowed New York University with $2.5 million to fund scholarships to enable African women to attend graduate school, providing strong women with the training they need to become leaders in their own countries. She provided 63 rural schools with libraries and teacher aids, helping to educate the most impoverished of South Africa’s children.

Her Oprah Winfrey Scholars program provides scholarship assistance to students who promise to use their education to give back to their communities or their countries.

She has used her celebrity status to enlist others. Oprah’s Angel Network provides $100,000 awards to those who commit their lives to the service of others. Oprah’s Piggy Bank enlisted her viewers to send in spare change, raising $1 million that she immediately matched, to help send disadvantaged kids to college.

The list could go on. And she keeps much of her philanthropy quiet, not seeking publicity for the scope of her generosity.

For providing this example of energy and generosity, of grace and grit, surely Oprah Winfrey deserves to be the Person of the Year.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is the head of the Rainbow PUSH organization. This column was distributed by Tribune Media.
The stuff of legends.

[Hiroshi2]

And why weren't you there TB................I'm sure you could've taken off work or something ;)



When I heard about that I was like, shit..............and I thought she was giving away Chevy Aveos or some cheap shit like that but that's a pretty decent car.

[Fireblade]

damnit.. I want a free car.

[Filiprish]

That was a cool episode, I watched it. I found the story at the end about a homeless Mexican girl, in CA, struggling to make it through college more interesting, tho. She got a full-ride scholorship to any college of her choice.

[mr. x]

oprah so needs to take over with her lil fempire

oh wait no she doesnt

[Faithless]

Nice idea the car.

Guess someone forgot about the taxes.

Oprah Car Winners Will Pay Taxes (http://www.wxyz.com/wxyz/nw_local_news/article/0,2132,WXYZ_15924_3204073,00.html)
By Action News Team
Web produced by Seth Myers
September 23, 2004

The lucky folks who won cars on the Oprah Winfrey Show will have to pay taxes if they want to keep their prizes.

The cost of their good fortune could be as much as $7,000 for a typical winner. Still, that is certainly not bad for what they received.

Oprah gave new Pontiac G6 cars to 276 people last week. The cars, which came courtesy of General Motors, normally carry a price tag of $28,500.

The value of the cars needs to be claimed as income. The Oprah show tells 7 Action News that it is the same tax anybody has to pay when they win prizes on a game show or a lottery.

7 Action News spoke to two winners from Michigan. They both say they knew about the tax when they accepted their cars from Oprah.

Oprah selected guests for her show from people who had told her of their need for new cars.
Will / should she pay the taxes, too?

[ism]

She can't pay the taxes. Giving the people cash would just be more income. There's nothing she can do about it. Blame the IRS. =D

Only thing that can be done is if Pontiac decides to lower the MSRP of the car.

lol. the first thing I thought of when I heard about the giveaway was how are these poor people gonna pay for the tax? Oprah and Pontiac could have done them a favor and given them a car around $16-18k.

[Faithless]

^ OK, I see that. It was a thought without knowing the tax rules.

Let's see what Pontiac says about the MSRP break. I submitted an email to them via --

http://www.pontiac.com/contactus/emailus_comment_advertisement.jsp

Oprah's 'free' Pontiacs come with hidden price tag, recipients find (http://www3.cjad.com/content/cp_article.asp?id=/global_feeds/canadianpress/entertainmentnews/e092351A.htm)
Updated at 20:14 on September 23, 2004, EST.

CHICAGO (CP) - Hundreds of people who were given "free" cars by TV talk-show host Oprah Winfrey are complaining the gifts came with a hefty hidden price tag, the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper reported Thursday.

Many of the 276 recipients of the new Pontiacs that Winfrey gave away last week are going to have to fork over thousands of dollars in taxes. While Pontiac agreed to pay for most local charges - state sales tax and licensing fees - the recipients have to report the cars to the Internal Revenue Service as income.

Adding $28,500 to someone's income can push them into a higher tax bracket - which means they will have to pay about 25 per cent or more of the car's value in taxes.

For a nearly $30,000 car, that probably means, for most of the recipients, shelling out $7,125 for the "free" car.

"It's not really a free car, it's more of a 75-per-cent-off car," Susan Nelson, a recipient of one of the cars, told the Sun-Times.

Some recipients are going to wait a few months before actually picking up their cars so they can figure out how to pay for the taxes.

Heather Lundeen said she has looked into a car loan to pay off the taxes.
.
What some GM insiders felt about the give-away --

GM was split on Oprah deal; some tried to stop costly car giveaway (http://www.crainsdetroit.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?postDate=2004-09-20&newsId=4629)
By Jason Stein, Automotive News
Sept. 20, 2004 3:12 PM

DETROIT — Not everyone at General Motors Corp. thought that giving away 276 Pontiac G6 sedans on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” last week was a fabulous idea.

And even after the huge publicity score, several GM insiders say they don’t expect it to help sell many units of the sporty new sedan.

But the giant giveaway certainly got the nation talking.

Pontiac had 500,000 visitors to its Web site in the first two days after the show was broadcast Monday, Sept. 13. Pontiac officials say their Web site averages about 30,000 hits a day.

A survey of U.S. broadcast media cited 674 TV news reports related to the event, the highest total for any single-day Big Three automotive event, according to Video Monitoring Service, a media-tracking firm in New York.

GM insiders say the project was opposed at several steps on the way to approval. But top sales and marketing executives supported the idea from the get-go and wanted to see it through.

Wrong target?

The opponents thought Oprah’s audience of stay-at-home housewives was the wrong demographic target for the male-oriented $21,300 Grand Am successor.

A GM promotions unit, R*Works, also questioned the return on GM’s investment. Executives at R*Works, which plans and measures the effectiveness of sponsorships and promotions, said they had no model from which to judge the idea. They said they couldn’t put a value on the Oprah giveaway. A GM source says the company spent about $8 million on the giveaway, including the cost of the vehicles plus administrative costs.

Nine days before the show’s Sept. 9 taping — and just two days before Winfrey was scheduled to tour the G6 assembly plant in Michigan’s Orion Township — some midlevel GM managers sent an official written objection to their bosses, according to a GM source. But the deal would be signed the same day. One manager said that he had “moderate doubt” that the giveaway would result in a positive impact to Pontiac’s business.

But backers of the giveaway succeeded in pushing it through, and Winfrey visited the plant on Sept. 2, as scheduled.

“This thing could have died a million deaths all the way through,” says Mark-Hans Richer, director of Pontiac marketing.

How it started

The idea was hatched at Pontiac 10 months ago during a brainstorming session. The marketing team then took the idea to Oprah Winfrey’s producers, who loved the notion.

Pontiac managers liked the idea because “it was an event so large no competitor could mimic or follow,” Richer says.

“But honestly, some people weren’t convinced doing anything with Oprah was a good idea,” he says. “When you are in the early planning stages, you have to take into account the opinions of others, and you’ve got to think about it.

“Some wondered if her identity and audience are the right fit for the Pontiac identity, and we had to work through that.”

Negotiations continued with Oprah’s producers over several months. In the third week of August, Pontiac’s marketing leaders delivered a 25-page brief outlining the project to Mark LaNeve, GM’s newly appointed North American vice president of marketing and advertising, and his predecessor, John Middlebrook. Both supported the idea. But Middlebrook told the Pontiac executives to find the money in their own budget.

To pay for the project, Pontiac had to cancel some late-night network broadcast and cable commercials, as well as some print magazine ads.

OnStar, which received an endorsement from Winfrey on the show, helped Pontiac cover some of the cost.

What’s it worth?

Pontiac says it’s hard to put a value on word-of-mouth advertising. In the end, the division justified the promotion by accounting for the time the G6 was featured on the program. It also factored in the number of mentions it would receive, reruns, Web exposure and TV ratings.

Some marketing decision makers thought giving away 100 cars — instead of 276 — would work just as well.

Richer’s team thought Pontiac had to go all the way for the idea to be effective.

Bill Koenigsberg, CEO of Horizon Media of New York, a media buying firm that works with automotive dealers, says, “It’s a tremendous amount of goodwill on Pontiac’s part.

“Could they have achieved similar goodwill with less investment? Yes, they could have. It’s a terrific giveaway, but at what price?”

Some skepticism

Some of Pontiac’s competitors were skeptical, too.

“We couldn’t do that,” said Hyundai Motor America CEO Robert Cosmai. “But I don’t think we would need to spend $7 million to accomplish the same thing in publicity.”

Pontiac says it got its money’s worth. With a 90-day commitment on Oprah’s Web site, the massive publicity buzz and the continuing exposure from future reruns of the giveaway show, the high-priced project delivered about the same publicity punch as the canceled TV commercials and print ads would have.

But not everyone inside General Motors agrees.

Says one company source: “I don’t know if we ever totally eliminated the nonbelievers.”

From Automotive News

[nonamerasian]

Can't they wipe their tears and sell the cars?

[Cipherous]

I thought GM got a steal with the publicity stunt. They gave away 7 million dollars worth of cars but probably got alot more in media exposure.

[missmeow]

Damn, I guess this proves that someone will always find something shitty in even the best of things. Oprah doesn't owe it them to pay their taxes. GM doesn't either. It's a gift. Plain and simple.

So what if poor people can't afford the taxes? It's a gift, they can take or not. Besides, nothing is stopping them from selling the car, paying the taxes, and buying economical car like say, a honda civic, with the money leftover.

Talk about shortsightedness.

[Fireblade]

If it isn't at least 101% free, then it really isn't free at all.

[Faithless]

I think the msrp should be lowered. $28,000+ for a car that seems to have a generally lower MSRP (if you look around the web). It's either totally chalked with options or GM overpriced the car for the Oprah show.

[missmeow]

Why would GM overprice the car for the Oprah show? They have nothing to gain by getting publicity on a car that is overpriced. GM is already paying for the associated fees. They can't pay people's income taxes though.

Honestly, if the people accept the gift, then they should accept the terms that came with it. It's a GIFT. Where were they yesterday? Without a damn $28K car. Jesus. They can sell it, pay the taxes and use the money to buy a cheaper car. And guess what? They'll have a car they did not have free.

I can't believe people are making a big deal about this.

[Faithless]

I don't know why GM would overprice there car. I think I'm just noticing a difference between what they say the car is valued at (for the show) and what its MSRP seems to be on average (by a review of the web).

And maybe it's one of those things where people (Oprah and her guests) weren't aware of the consequences. Maybe, there should have been some sort of disclaimer during Oprah's show that "you would have to pay the taxes" if you accept this car.

It is a gift. Right. And it would be downright funny, if the GM gift, is then sold, rather than then the intender receivers using it for themselves.

It's not a big deal as much as it is a funny side-effect that could have a better solution / resolution.

.
A Motley Fool solution. (http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2004/mft04092403.htm)
And as a personal note to the 8% that cast their vote in favor of forfeiting the prize, I have two pieces of advice for you: Fool.com and eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY). Seriously. If you don't think that you could double or triple the amount that would be due on that tax bill by flipping the mint-fresh cars into the automotive aftermarket you really do need some basic personal finance training and Meg Whitman on speed dial.

[Faithless]

Only thing that can be done is if Pontiac decides to lower the MSRP of the car.

lol. the first thing I thought of when I heard about the giveaway was how are these poor people gonna pay for the tax? Oprah and Pontiac could have done them a favor and given them a car around $16-18k.
I got a response back from GM, and they say --
I do apologize, the Manufactures Suggested Retail Price is a set price for all customers and unfortunately, is not a negotiable item.
.
Since Mr. Vetsch was so kind as to respond, maybe he can speak to missmeow's (and others) suggestions about selling the G6. :wink:

[Irezumi Kiss]

I personally would've had a room-full of tricked-out G5 Powerbooks and desktops, but, hey...this is Oprah we're talking about...

She's like T'Pau on the old Star Trek series...

[Faithless]

And to the point about selling the G6 is the recipients so chose...
.
The Pontiac G6 is a gift from General Motors and Oprah Winfrey. The G6 winners are the owner of the vehicle and if the new owner of the G6 wants to sell there vehicle, that will be the new owners choice. If the
new owner does decide to sell there G6, General Motors would hope they would look at other General Motors brand vehicles before looking at non GM vehicles. But that will be the choice of the owner of the G6.
Now, what does it say about GM, if the recipients deside to go with a Mini Cooper in the end? :rolleyes:

[rice cracker]

I'm waiting for someone to crash their new car and then sue Oprah.

Wait for it...
Wait for it...

[Arex]

What I don't understand are concerns for these "unfortunate" recipients' incomes being pushed up into the 25% marginal tax bracket. If someone's going to pay the full $7,000 in taxes on this prize, that means they're already making at least $56,800 per year (because the 25% marginal rate only applies to amounts over and above $56,801 per the 2003 IRS marginal income tax rate schedule). To me, that means they can already afford a damn car and shouldn't have been picked for the prize to begin with.

Worst case, they're paying $7k on a car purportedly valued at $28k (but I'm guessing probably closer to $23-25k). Net gain is still between $16-21k in their pockets if they don't want the car or really can't afford to pay taxes on the car and have to sell it. That's enough dough to put them in any one of a huge selection of cars, free and clear. As missmeow said, that's still a lot better a position than they were before the gift. Whatta bunch of whiners. I wonder if anyone's miffed that they need to get liability insurance to boot. "My driving record sucks ass! While driving my $200 hoopty, I only had to pay $2,000 a year in liability insurance. Now that I've got my G6, my rates have increased to $3,000! Oprah sucks!"

One shitty thing is how most American cars seem to have their MSRPs set with built-in rebates in mind. Since almost every high-volume car is offered with at least $1,000 to $3,000 in rebates, the street price for the cars is never even close to MSRP. So while they pay taxes based on MSRP, they're actually getting something significantly lower in value. Still, when it's all netted out, they're getting something they didn't have before. Stop whining.

RX