Founded in 1977, American Family Publishers (AFP) was one of America's leading marketers of magazine subscriptions.
AFP was jointly owned by TAF Holdings, Inc. (a subsidiary of Time Inc.) and a group of private investors.
It is best known for running sweepstakes in which a large amount of money was offered as the grand prize (in a range of several hundred thousand to one or more million dollars).
The winner was chosen at random, by a professional auditing company, from among all who responded to the sweepstakes, regardless of whether a magazine subscription was purchased or not.
[2] In a related phenomenon connected to the company's promotion tactics, news stories reported cases of elderly Americans traveling to Florida (the company, at least for some time, routed their mail through St. Petersburg, Florida) in an effort to collect the money that they believed they had won, because of the promotional language contained in the sweepstakes entry forms (for instance, their frequently used phrase You may have already won $10,000,000!, although mitigated by an introductory line that stated "If you have the winning number...," led people to believe that they had already won the major prize).