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| Pepsi's mistake that led to giving away the plane as a prize |
It was 1995, but the 'War of Tales' that started in the 1970s was still going on.
The bitter rivalry between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola began the moment the Pepsi-Cola Company was founded in 1902, ten years after the Coca-Cola Company.
Although Coca-Cola dominated the market, Pepsi used price cuts and other tactics to gain market share.
In 1975, Pepsi launched a marketing campaign called the 'Pepsi Challenge' aimed at directly targeting its competitors.
During this time he produced many advertisements and two decades later he launched an advertising campaign called 'Pepsi Stuff' with the tagline 'Drink Pepsi and get stuff.'
If customers kept the Pepsi bottle caps, they would get points and could redeem them for t-shirts, hats, jeans, leather jackets, handbags, and mountain bikes.
It turned out to be one of the most successful competition campaigns among soft drink companies, but there was a flaw in the campaign that soon became a major problem for the company.
Fighter plane
Large images of supermodel Cindy Crawford were used in stores to promote the campaign, but these images did not appeal to the 'Pepsi generation' that the company wanted to dominate.
To make the campaign more effective, it was also promoted on TV and in cinemas during movies.
An ad created under the campaign showed a child getting ready to go to school.
The ad showed the child wearing some of the items that Pepsi would give away in exchange for its bottle caps or cans, along with points to earn them. For example, 75 Pepsi points for a T-shirt, 1450 Pepsi points for a jacket, etc.
The ad read, 'The more Pepsi you drink, the more Pepsi products you have a chance to win.
In this ad, the child leaves home dressed up and arrives at school in a fighter jet.
7 million Pepsi points are written on the TV screen to get this fighter jet and then the next phrase in the ad was the catch line of the Pepsi ad.
At no time in the U.S. did this ad include the warning text often included in newspaper ads that this last item was not part of the ad campaign.
One point on a bottle of Pepsi
Obviously, no one at the company would have pulled out a pen and paper and used math to allocate the value of a fighter jet's Pepsi Points.
Usually, when it comes to large numbers, after a certain period, the word 'too many' is used.
Seventeen lakhs in this situation would come in the same period because if you think about it, getting these points can be very difficult for any merchandise.
A bottle of Pepsi earned you one point, and thus packages of cans earned you fewer points. That means you get four points for 24 cans.
That means you had to drink a lot of Pepsi to win a T-shirt and even more to win a Harrier plane.
The truth is that the people who were making the commercial never stopped to think how much Pepsi they would have to drink because it was a means of getting attention.
However, one person managed to differentiate this collection. Not only that, but he also had a way to earn these points.
John Lennard
Lennard was a college student at the time trying to earn money in various ways, but his favorite hobby was mountain climbing.
He was 20 years old and since childhood, he had done many such jobs for this purpose. He had heard of an ad that offered you a chance to win a plane and when he saw it, he also noticed the absence of any promise in it, so he immediately subtracted that sum. What Pepsi didn't do.
He did the math to figure out how many Pepsi Points he would need to win a Harrier plane. He subtracted that number from the cost of stocking and uncapping millions of bottles and found that the offer was still the best.
That is, you were getting an opportunity to buy an aircraft for only four million dollars, which was worth two million three million dollars.
He pitched the project to billionaire entrepreneur Todd Hoffman, whom he had befriended and mentored during a mountaineering trip.
Hoffman was several years older than him and had much more experience. He asked Lennard key questions that could gauge the maturity of the project.
One of these questions led to the end of the project. What if they are close to collecting the required labels and the promotion ends?
So what will they do with these millions of unlabeled bottles?
Pepsi's decision to take legal action in New York
Disillusioned here, one day while reading the Pepsi catalog, Lennard came across something that opened another path for him.
He found out that to earn Pepsi points there is another way and that is that one point can be bought for only 10 cents, which means that the 7 million points needed to win the plane could be obtained for only 7 million dollars.
When he told this to Hoffman, he immediately gave Lennard a check for the amount. Thus began a dialogue that can be likened to a slow-motion table tennis match.
Pepsi's first reaction to this was 'Great! Here's your check and we're giving you some gift certificates along with it.'
"If we are not informed of the transfer of Pepsi Points within 10 days, we will have no choice but to take legal action against Pepsi," Lennard and Hoffman responded.
Pepsi, however, instead decided to pursue legal action against them in New York, ensuring that even if legal action did take place, it would be in a place where the laws on businesses were lenient.
In the final ruling, it was said that Pepsi had requested the court to "enter a judgment that would show that they were not responsible for providing a Harrier jet."
The case started a media frenzy that portrayed Lennard in the right and Pepsi as a bad guy, but in the end, Lennard was portrayed as a self-interested guy who would harm a multinational company for his own gain. wants to deliver
Lennard vs Pepsi
This conflict continued for many years. Meanwhile, Lennard also turned down an offer from PepsiCo to settle the case out of court for some compensation.
He also decided to sue Hoffman in Florida, but the case is still taught in American law schools today as Lennard v. PepsiCo.
At one point, Michael Avenatti became part of the fight, later famously representing porn star Stormy Daniels in her case against Donald Trump, but in 2022 he was charged with fraud with four of his clients, including Daniels. Punished for doing.
Avenatti, however, wanted to pressure PepsiCo through a previous lawsuit in which the company failed to deliver $1 million in prize money to its customers in the Philippines, claiming it was due to a computer error. However, Hoffman spoke out against doing so, saying it was tantamount to blackmail.
Finally, in 1999, the trial began in New York, Pepsi's favorite state.
The trial
It was a very difficult case for Lennard and Hoffman to win against not only Pepsi's army of lawyers but also their insurance and advertising companies.
However, if this decision was taken by the common people, they could have gained an upper hand. Unfortunately, Judge Kumba Wood ruled out the possibility of a jury trial. He chose to make his own decision in this regard.
Another option that Lennard could have benefited from was a court procedure known as a 'deposition' in which one party asks other parties or witnesses oral questions under oath.
Lennard knew that the same commercial had also been released in Canada, but he had written a warning under the text 'Get a Harrier Jet for 7 million Pepsi Points'.
Apart from this, Pepsi added more zeros in the points by changing this commercial, and thus these points were increased to 70 crores. Along with it was written a text saying 'we are joking' which could be seen as an admission of error.
If he had been able to ask questions of the executives at the advertising company BBDO, especially about the decisions they made, he would have been able to defend his position.
However, Judge Wood decided that he already had all the evidence and did not need a deposition. After a long wait after the hearing, the decision came in favor of Pepsi.
Judge Wood wrote in the judgment that "no reasonable person would have come to this decision after looking at the advertisement and thinking that the company could offer Harrier aircraft to its customers."
In the lengthy ruling, the judge also wrote that "no school provides a landing runway for its students' fighter jets or will not ameliorate the disturbance that would be caused by such aircraft."
What finally happened?
Judge Wood not only ruined Lennard's teenage dream, but also left everyone wondering why Pepsi made such a mistake, but Andrew Renzi found out in the Netflix documentary 'Pepsi, Where's My Plane?' have tried
In it, Michael Petty, former creative director of the ad company, revealed that the commercial was initially decided to have only 70 million points for the Harriet plane, but when the ad was shown to Pepsi, an executive told them to The number cannot be read.
Two Pepsi executives present at the time agreed, but no one could remember who the officer was who called for the change.
Petty says that he told them at the time that it was not necessary to understand the number, it was only necessary that it was 700 million, that is, it was only necessary to know that the number seven was followed by several zeros to know it. Know that this is impossible and this is written in jest.
However, they were not ready to agree to them.
He first drew a zero but was still having trouble reading. Then another zero was drawn, then everyone agreed that it looked better now.
"He should have thought about it at the time because it was his promotion," says Renzi. It was reviewed by their legal system to make sure everything was in order.''
And if it did, this ad made in 1995 would have been completely forgotten.