“A teaser on a card gives it more value than just something that can be redeemed -- even better when it doesn’t cost consumers anything extra,” he says. “Five or six years ago, the big way to sell videogames was to sell a disc with one level on it: if you wanted to go beyond that, you’d have to get a code to unlock it. I could see that in a gift card and, if I were a marketer that might be the approach I’d use.”

Terry Llachs, group vice president of marketing and head of corporate public relations for Blackhawk, believes the industry will “see more tests in this area over the next year or two.” Blackhawk, for instance, “has all these sports cards, and they would marry very well to content like video clips and statistics,” she says.

Andrew Buss, a director of Stamford, Conn.-based Archstone Consulting, believes that cards with additional content are a great innovation -- but he is already looking at the coming evolution. “Maybe if someone buys a spa card, they can also get a limo ride to the spa,” he says. “The question is the cost of these innovations. Incremental value might change the pricing structure, but in general, the more value you can provide customers at minimal cost, the more cards you can sell and the more you can increase your store traffic.”

The next level of card marketing may involve cell phones. “It’s already available in Japan and Korea, where people are using their phones as mobile wallets,” Buss says. “Right now, the most innovative stuff [in the United States] is the DVD card, but we’re not far from moving past that and perhaps using RFID technology to load all gift cards into a person’s phone.

“Consumers don’t care about having the plastic,” he says. “They want functionality that doesn’t cost them anything.”

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