This week's collection of whimsical and curious stories will talk about the perils of advertisement. More specifically, it is a story about the perils of overpromising while underestimating the willingness of your customers to read the fine print. Luckily, for our protagonist corporation, it could rely on the resourcefulness of its lawyers.
Pepsi Points - Long-term readers of this newsletter will recall that Pepsi briefly owned the 6th largest navy on the planet in a barter agreement with the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Apparently, the company since acquired a certain taste for military hardware. When, in 1995, it launched an ad campaign to promote its new "Pepsi Points" customer loyalty scheme, it promised consumers not just t-shirts (75 Pepsi Points) and leather jackets (1450 Pepsi Points), but also a military jet (7M Pepsi Points) (Link to the ad).
The company had apparently not expected that anybody would ever seriously consider drinking that much Pepsi (7M 2L bottles at a cost of $1/bottle). However, while $7M was a lot of money for an oil tanker worth of very sugary drink, it was a bargain for a military aircraft. Since the fine print revealed that you could also directly buy Pepsi Points (for 10 cents a point), this made the offer even more appealing (now down to $0.7M for the jet). Indeed this was so appealing, that John Leonard, a 21-year old college student, found a few investors and ordered one. Since Pepsi was apparently in no mood to hand out military aircraft at bargain rates, it refused to deliver and a lawsuit followed (Leonard v. Pepsico). The lawsuit ultimately failed with the court concluding that "no reasonable person would believe that the advertisement was anything other than a fanciful promotion". However, the company did not take any chances and updated its commercial to demand 700M Pepsi Points for the jet.
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Link to a CBS news article on the story
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