Coca-Cola aggressively manufactured more than 55 million cards in hopes that one out of every five Americans would fully embrace their carbonated identities. Borrowing a page from your drug dealer, cards were peddled in high schools, pizza joints, and spring break hotspots like Daytona Beach. Three million alone were mailed directly to teens in an attempt to hook them on both junk food and junk mail. Each card was hyper-localized, offering an array of seasonal "benefits" that varied widely from town to town. There were 280 different versions of the goddamn thing, each specific to a different U.S. soda bottling territory -- which, upon a cursory glance, looks like a map of places that oppose same-sex marriage.
The card even came outfitted in its own protective cardboard sleeve, lest such a rare and valuable commodity incur damage from the elements, with a six-page fold out list that highlighted precisely where you'd be able to use the thing. If you were the kind of 10th grader who got horny over small businesses and unfurling maps, 1998 was your summer of 69.