Marketers give away freebies all the time to generate buzz and promote their products. Usually these freebies are cheap trinkets like toys, keyrings and trading cards that cost next to nothing to produce. But back in the 1950s, a Chicago advertising executive named Bruce Baker came up with a stranger-than-fiction marketing gimmick for the Quaker Oats Company. Instead of toys, Baker decided that the cereal manufacturer should give away land, real land in gold-rich Yukon county in Canada, with every box of Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat. At first his bosses scoffed at the idea, but then he explained, the land would be really small, just a square inch in size.

Newspaper advertisement of the Klondike Big Inch Land Promotion.