Anyway, I thought it was a neat idea. While I'm not the kind of guy that would buy a lottery ticket, I am the kind of guy that would just for fun go treasure hunting. I think it would be awesome if somebody with Zuckerberg type wealth took like $100mil and split it into 1000 $100K treasures hidden all over the country. It'd probably get a lot of people away from the computer screen and the Cheetos.
Heck, it wouldn't even have to be that. Just some caches with maybe a $100 bill and a bunch of gift certificates for outdoor gear. Call it $500 total investment for the main benefactor per treasure, with (hopefully) REI, Mountain House, Bass Pro, LL Bean and others donating part of the gift certificates to drive the value up. (And hopefully manufacture them some new customers, or at least bring people who already spend time outdoors into their stores.) Put them 2-5 miles from usable roads, so they're not too easy to get, but also not too difficult for the couch potatoes who would benefit most from suddenly having a pretty decent backpacking, camping or fishing setup and state and/or NPS annual membership.
Any business that would dump $1M on a marketing effort anyway could do 2,000 of these for that money. Call it 1500 caches plus some expenses for the folks who actually have to go place them. Since they needn't be bigger than a #10 envelope, hiding them won't be a huge undertaking. Serializing them with a well-worthwhile bonus prize available upon scanning a code or entering the serial number on a website (possibly that could "activate" the gift certificates) would allow realtime updating of found caches for the hunters to check before setting out. Maybe even throw in a "grand prize" cache each year with the keys and title to a car already loaded for a serious campout.
