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PepsiCola and CocaCola have always fought for the market
2 hours ago
The year is 1995. The “glue war” that began in the 1970s continued at full speed.
In fact, the bitter rivalry between CocaCola and PepsiCola had begun at the very moment the PepsiCola Company was founded in 1902, ten years after the CocaCola Company.
While CocaCola dominated, Pepsi cut prices and used other gimmicks to gain market share.
Until, in 1975, she created what she called the “Pepsi Challenge,” which aimed squarely at her competitors and declared this marketing war.
Two decades and many commercials later, it invested in the “Pepsi Stuff” ad campaign, whose slogan was “Drink Pepsi and get stuff.”
If consumers kept the Pepsi tags, they earned points that could be redeemed for merchandise such as Tshirts, baseball caps, denim and leather jackets, handbags, and mountain bikes.
This was the most successful strategy in the dispute between the two soft drinks.
But there was a stumbling block in Pepsi’s path that only narrowly became a major obstacle.
The plane
Stores advertised the promotion at points of sale with images of supermodel Cindy Crawford. But the catalogs themselves were unattractive, especially for the socalled “Pepsi generation” who wanted to win them over.
In order to increase its impact, the campaign needed to be amplified on advertising’s great battlefield the film and television screens.
The creative professionals then idealized a commercial showing a boy preparing for school.
Wearing some of the items offered by the company, the number of points required to purchase appeared: “Tshirt, 75 Pepsi points”; “Jacket, 1,450 Pepsi Points”.
“The more Pepsi you drink, the more cool stuff you’ll get,” the narrator said.
When he was done, the boy would leave home and board a fighter jet to go to school. The words appeared on the screen:
“Harrier Fighter Plane, 7,000,000 Pepsi Points” followed by the campaign slogan.
At no point in the commercial, which was originally released in the United States, did these lowercase subtitles, which we should always read, appear. In this case, they should have indicated that this last item was not included in the promotion.
math question
Of course, no one in the company took pen and paper to do the math before pinning the fighter jet in Pepsi points. When it comes to large numbers, anything after a certain point just suggests that the number is too large.
In this case, the number 7 million served its purpose, especially considering how difficult it was to get the required points for each commodity.
Each bottle of soda was only worth one point. For cans, the situation was even worse: a pack of 24 cans, for example, was worth four points.
In other words, you had to drink a lot of Pepsi to win the tshirt in the ad… and the amount to redeem the plane was absurd.
In fact, those responsible for the commercial never stopped thinking about the crowd. For her, it was just a gimmick to get viewers’ attention.
Until someone did the math. What’s more, he got the necessary points to win the plane.
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Awardwinning 1991 Pepsi commercial starring supermodel Cindy Crawford
John Leonard
John Leonard was a college student. He was always looking for ways to make money to fund his adventures particularly his passion for mountaineering.
He was 20 years old and had a long list of jobs he had done since he was little with that goal in mind.
One day he heard about a commercial that offered an opportunity to win a plane. As he watched it, he noted there was no disclaimer — and decided to do the homework Pepsi hadn’t done.
He added and multiplied to know how many soft drinks he would have to buy to win the fighter plane. He then calculated the amount he would have to spend to store millions of bottles and remove the labels. And he concluded that despite the hefty numbers, the offer was indeed a steal.
It would cost him about $4 million to acquire a plane worth about $23 million.
Leonard pitched his plan to millionaire Todd Hoffman, whom he befriended during a trip where he was working as a mountain guide.
Hoffman, several years his senior and much more experienced, asked the necessary questions to determine the viability of the plan.
Until one of these questions derailed the plan: What would happen when the promotion ended, when they were about to bring all the labels together? What would you do with millions of unlabeled soda bottles?
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John Leonard (left) and Todd Hoffman (right) remain friends to this day.
table tennis
Disappointed, Leonard gave up. But one day, while flipping through the Pepsi catalogue, he found another way.
Pepsi offered to sell the points for cash for $0.10 each, meaning the seven million points needed to redeem the plane would cost $700,000.
Hoffman wrote the check and they mailed it to Pepsi. It started what looked more like a slow motion ping pong game.
Pepsi’s first response was, “That’s funny! Here’s your check and some freebie coupons.”
Leonard and Hoffman responded as follows:
“If we do not receive remittance instructions within 10 business days of the date of this letter, we have no choice but to take legal action against Pepsi.”
But the company overtook itself, filing a petition in New York and assuring that all trials would take place in a location known to be probusiness.
With the petition, Pepsi attempted “to obtain a judicial determination that it was not obliged to provide the complainant with a Harrier jet,” according to the final statement.
The case sparked a frenzy in the press, which initially portrayed Leonard as David fighting Goliath (Pepsi). But over time, Leonard was labeled an opportunist, someone who wanted to take advantage of the poor soft drink multinational.
Leonard x PepsiCo
The litigation lasted for years.
Throughout the process, Leonard even turned down an offer from the soft drink maker.
Because Leonard and Hoffman also filed suit in the state of Florida, American law schools still teach the case as “Leonard v. PepsiCo” not the other way around.
At one point, the dispute gained the support of attorney Michael Avenatti, who years later would become the famous defending porn actress Stormy Daniels in her legal battle against Donald Trump. In 2022, Avenatti was convicted of cheating four of his clients, including Daniels himself.
But when Avenatti proposed to threaten Pepsi with an earlier case in which the company failed to deliver on a promise of a millionaire prize to its consumers in the Philippines, citing a computer glitch, Hoffman declined because it seemed to him the strategy would be blackmail.
The trial finally took place in 1999 in Pepsi’s preferred jurisdiction: New York.
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Michael Avenatti and Stormy Daniels in 2018
The judgment
For Leonard and Hoffman, the prospect of winning against Pepsi’s army of lawyers, his insurers, and the ad agency looked slim. But they would have better chances if the decision was made by a jury of ordinary people.
Unfortunately, Judge Kimba Wood ruled out a jury trial. And opted for summary judgment.
Another option that could have worked to Leonard’s advantage was affidavits — where each party questions the other party or sworn witness.
Leonard had discovered that the same commercial had been published in Canada but with the crucial lower case letters below the words “Harrier Fighter Jet: 7,000,000 Pepsi Points”.
Also, Pepsi had already altered the commercial, adding zeros it was now 700 million points for the plane and adding a caption that said “Just kidding.” The changes could be interpreted as an admission of error.
Executives at ad agency BBDO, which created the ad, could be questioned about these and other decisions and they could do a better job of defending their position.
But the judge ruled that she already had the relevant facts, so she didn’t admit testimony either.
After the hearing, there was another long wait before Judge Kimba Wood finally ruled in Pepsi’s favor.
“No impartial person could reasonably have concluded that the commercial was actually offering consumers a Harrier aircraft,” she wrote in a lengthy document that included comments such as:
“No school would provide a landing pad for a student’s fighter plane, nor would they condone the disruption that would be caused by the use of the plane.”
What happened?
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The Netflix documentary Pepsi, Where’s My Plane? tells the story of John Leonard and the promotion of Pepsi Points
Judge Wood not only ended Leonard’s dream, but also left us wondering why Pepsi made that mistake.
But film producer Andrew Renzi found the answer in the Pepsi documentary Where’s My Plane? (2022), which he made for Netflix.
In it, former creative director of the advertising agency responsible for Pepsi ads, Michael Patti, revealed that the score originally quoted in the Harrier plane commercial was 700,000,000,000,000 (700 trillion).
But when the Pepsi commercial was presented in the editing room, one of the company’s executives said it was a difficult number to read.
Two Pepsi executives who were present confirmed in the documentary that this was the case, but no one recalled who made the observation.
Patti said she explained to them that it didn’t have to be legible, that you didn’t need to know the exact number. It’s enough “to see that it was a 7 with a lot of zeros to understand that it was impossible and funny”.
But he couldn’t convince her.
They crossed out a zero, but it didn’t seem like enough. Then they cut another one until everyone agreed that that was better.
“You should have known better. It was her promotion. It went through the legal department who reviewed it [o anúncio] to make sure everything is right,” Renzi recalls.
Had everything been correct, the 1995 Pepsi commercial would have been forgotten.