Hiding the Bible in Plain Sight: How a CD-rom Giveaway Promotion Lead to the Demise of lightdog
Yet Another Weird Thing I Learned From Collecting
As you probably know by now, I collect a wide variety of things. The majority of the items in my collection are of the paper of photographic variety. However, lately I’ve been on a kick to find old CD-roms from the ‘90s and early 2000s, especially from internet service providers (ISP).
I scout the auction sites looking for lots of old discs for some theoretical future project that may or may not come to fruition and am never sure what I am going to find.
One of my most recent purchases was four in a series of five free CD-rom games given out free by General Mills in the Summer of 2000. I was able to find Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, Amazon Trail 3rd Edition, Clue and Carmen Sandiego: Word Detective. I have yet to find a good version of Lego Creator for a reasonable price.
Really?
The games themselves are not of much interest to me. It’s the sleeves that caught my attention. These free discs all contained sleeves with the General Mills logo in the upper left corner, the Over $50 Value includes game, Merriam-Webster Dictionary and internet access offer in the bottom left corner; and the caped dog logo with lightdog underneath in the bottom right. On the back it states that lightdog is offering 250 free hours(!) of internet service FREE!
Me being me, I had to know who and what lightdog was and why I had never heard of them before now.
How did this unknown company form a partnership with General Mills? Did they succeed only to get swallowed up by another ISP? The answer came upon my first Google search.
Welcome to another tale of weird things I learned from collecting weird things.
The following article appeared on the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal website on September 3, 2000:
Lightdog Creditors Seek Chapter 7
General Mills promotion tied to $10M dispute
By Mark Reilly – Staff Reporter
Creditors of lightdog.com Inc., a Minneapolis-based company that provides families with pre-filtered Internet access, are petitioning a court to force the firm into Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation.
The year-old lightdog, which marketed its services to parents worried about easily accessible sex sites on the Internet, owes nearly $10 million to six of its vendors and partners, according to court documents filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Minneapolis.
lightdog’s assets were not disclosed.
A spokesman for lightdog said the company had no comment on the action. But an answer to the petition filed this week by lightdog’s attorneys asked the court to deny the petition.
The answer said lightdog was involved in legal disputes with several of the creditors and that they had created a situation in which lightdog is without any revenue stream. lightdog, which said it employs about 75 people, did not state how long it had been operating without revenue.
The court filing also said that lightdog would soon be filing lawsuits against its creditors.
The creditors petitioning the court include lightdog’s own Internet provider, Hometown Internet Services of Indianapolis, and Magnetic Media Supplies Inc. of Plymouth. The largest claim comes from RhinoSoft Interactive Inc. of Oconomowoc, Wis.
The distributor of Christian-themed software claimed that lightSoft never paid $8.1 million in replication fees from a promotional effort with Golden Valley-based General Mills Inc. to distribute computer software through CDs in cereal boxes.
That venture wound up falling flat; the inclusion of Bible software on the CD drew criticism from other religious groups and an eventual apology from General Mills. Only 18 million of a planned 80 million of the CDs were produced.
In its filing, lightdog said that RhinoSoft may have been paid by General Mills and that its petition should be denied.
General Mills officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
I want to highlight a few points that caught my attention in the article and what I learned later
“The year-old lightdog…” lightdog.com, inc. was founded on October 21, 1999 and this article was published less than 11 months later. That is quite the rapid decline.
“…which marketed its services to parents worried about easily accessible sex sites on the Internet.” lightdog was a Christian-run ISP that filtered your search results for a “safer search experience” for $23.99 per month.
“That venture wound up falling flat; the inclusion of Bible software on the CD drew criticism from other religious groups and an eventual apology from General Mills. Only 18 million of a planned 80 million of the CDs were produced.” You read that correctly. lightdog sneakily added the bible to all of the free CD-rom games in the General Mills promotion.
Nowhere on the sleeves, front or back, or on the discs themselves, does it mention Zondervan Publishing House’s New International Version (NIV) bible. Amazingly, someone uploaded an in-depth tour of what the Amazon Trail disc contained and there is still no mention of the NIV bible anywhere. Not until the 3:30 or so mark of the video do you see the uploader click on the Home Reference button and voila, the NIV Bible is there. This was all part of a strategic plan by lightdog and software developers RhinoSoft.
When word got out about the hidden bible trick, people were understandably upset. Page 825 of the July 23, 2000 issue of the Miami Herald ran a Knight Ridder News Service story about the controversy. I will condense it for time purposes.
For General Mills Bibles and cereal a bad combination BY DAVID CRUMM
DETROIT — Bibles and Cheerios just don’t mix General Mills has announced.
But the public apology Friday night from the cereal giant came too late: More than 12 million boxes of cereal containing software versions of the Bible are headed for grocery-store shelves nationwide.The apology was a shock because the unprecedented promotion which involved giving away CD-ROM games dictionaries and Bibles was one of the most creative marketing ideas in years said Phyllis Tickle an editor at Publishers Weekly magazine and a leading expert on the marketing of religious publications.
“They got spooked with the idea of the Bible in their boxes” Tickle said Friday afternoon “There would have been some controversy but this probably would have been a very popular idea.” The irony is that for nearly a year General Mills’ partners in this promotion worked on a strategy to soft-sell the Bibles.
That included avoiding any mention in the colorful advertisements on General Mills’ new cereal boxes that a Bible was included on the CD-ROM featuring a popular computer game. The boxes are being distributed nationwide through August Even after the software is started on a computer users have to select the “Reference Library” from a variety of choices to discover the Bible software. The apology was a rebuff to Grand Rapids-based Zondervan Publishing which had given free licenses for the 12-13 million software copies of its New International Version of the Bible.
Reconstructing the meltdown of this $10 million cereal-and-software promotion from e-mails memos and interviews with some of the executives involved it appears that General Mills’ staff balked at dealing with the sometimes-stormy landscape of interfaith relations.
….
The portion of the statement that sparked a war of angry words among its partners in the promotion was the claim by General Mills that the Bible was slipped onto the CD-ROM “without our knowledge or consent.”
The claim that General Mills was unaware of the Bibles was backed up by a representative from lightdog, a Minneapolis-based Internet service provider whose promotional software was also on the General Mills CD-ROMs.
lightdog was one of the cereal-maker’s key partners in creating the discs. “We apologize to General Mills that they were not aware that the Bible was on there” said Lightdog spokesman John Anderson.
But the idea that someone slipped the Bible software onto the discs drew an angry response from Rhinosoft’s founder Farmington Hills native Gregory Swann.
“That is a flat-out lie” he said.General Mills’ viewpoint on the Bibles does appear to have changed dramatically within the space of a week according to an e-mail that General Mills’ spokeswoman Liv Lane sent to a Rhinosoft spokeswoman on Monday.
“The fact that there are Bibles and other reference materials on the CD-ROMs should be a great bonus for consumers.” Lane wrote in her e-mail to Rhinosoft on Monday. We’ve seen it happen too many times!”Rhinosoft’s Swann did not want that to happen. For nearly a year he had worked on a strategy to downplay the controversial nature of including the bible in a cereal box.
His idea was to market the Bible as part of a basic “Reference Library” for home computers that includes a Merriam-Webster dictionary and thesaurus and a one-volume encyclopedia.
It was that marketing concept that Publisher’s Weekly’s Tickle considered brilliant “Wow! Breakfast cereal computer games and the Bible thrown in too. What a cultural fruit salad this makes!” said Tickle
According to that piece, the hidden bibles were a collaborative effort between lighdog, RhinoSoft and sure seems like it was approved by General Mills. The fall out was minor for General Mills and RhinoSoft. General Mills did not send out the intended sixty-plus million CD-roms they had orginally stated were to be given out, instead they laid low for a year and went back to the drawing board.
General Mills continued their CD-rom giveway promotion the following two years, this time partnering with America Online. There were five games given away every year. This time the games were bible free.
RhinoSoft, founded in 1996, is still chugging along. lightdog took the fall for the controversy. The service provider were the only ones to apologize and took the fall square on the chin.
This promotion was, in the eyes of lightdog, to be the company’s launch in to more homes and more business. Instead, within three months of the promotion, lightdog was insolvent. The company filed Chapter 7 and was dissolved as a corporate entity in 2004.
I saved the last line from The Miami Herald article, a quote by the aforementioned Phyllis Tickle, to sum up this saga:
“It’s the American way right now to try to put religion and capitalism together.
Evangelicals have been pushing this whole idea of dressing up their faith in everyday street clothes to try to go out and seduce people in the marketplace to the ways of God.
This Bible-in-the-cereal-box idea is quintessential capitalism.”
And that quintessential capitalism killed lightdog.
WOW, what a story!
Thank you for researching and publishing this post. Excellent arcane trivia!