Three lessons for marketers from Netflix’s “Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?”

By Jeff Beer

Believe it or not, but there was once a time when Pepsi was arguably this country’s most popular and prolific marketer. The brand holds an impressive eight spots in the USA Today Ad Meter’s 10 Best Super Bowl Ads of the 1990s.

The 1990s are recent enough to still have familiar cultural references and marketing strategies—celebrity Super Bowl ads, anyone?—but also long enough ago to exist in a media environment that wasn’t as fragmented, making TV, movies, music, and yes, even ads, part of a pop monoculture.

So when the soda maker rolled out its Pepsi Points campaign in 1995, everybody saw it. It’s the one where Pepsi said you could get a $32 million Harrier Jet for seven million Pepsi Points. But when a 20-year-old named John Leonard tried to collect, the corporation said, “Just kidding.” That dispute is the subject of Netflix’s new documentary series Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?, a bit of ’90s nostalgia that goes down as smooth as a cola in a glass bottle.

Told primarily from the perspective of Leonard, and his friend and mentor Todd Hoffman, it’s framed as a David versus Goliath tale of an everyday kid taking on a giant global corporation. And it certainly is. But it’s also a story of a brand marketer gone incredibly, almost absurdly, wrong.

*SPOILER ALERT (if you haven’t seen the show or know the outcome of an event that took place when Bill Clinton was in the first term of his presidency.)*

After the better part of a decade, multiple lawsuits, a media circus, and more, Pepsi eventually won and didn’t have to buy Leonard a $32 million piece of military hardware. However, the brand didn’t really win here, and as much as marketers can watch the series like everyone else as guilty-pleasure TV, within this story are a few key lessons that anyone in advertising, marketing, and branding today still need to keep in mind.

Trust your creatives

In episode four, BBDO creative director Michael Patti breaks down the process behind the Harrier Jet ad. He says the spot was originally meant to focus on pairing an average kid with these increasingly cool Pepsi prizes. A kid like Ham Porter from 1993’s classic flick, The Sandlot.

“Most kids look like that,” said Patti, in the doc. Instead, Pepsi execs wanted more of a cool-kid image, and ended up with the Maverick mini-me that ended up in the ad.

Clients override agency creative ideas all the time. But there was another crucial mistake here. In Patti’s original pitch, the storyboard says, “Harrier Jet 700,000,000 Pepsi Points.” He says the combination of the absurdly high number, with the average kid look, made the ad funnier. Pepsi disagreed.

“When we brought Pepsi to the editorial house to show them the rough cut, it ended with the original 700 million,” says Patti. “And then one of the clients said about the 700 million Pepsi points, he said, ‘I find that hard to read.’”

The client thought the number was too big for the TV frame. So they dropped it down to 70 million. Still too big. So they dropped it down to seven million. The client said that fit just right.

Of course now, decades later, former chief marketing officer Brian Swette can’t recall who asked to have the number dropped. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t do it,” Swette said in the doc. “And I’m pretty sure it was nobody in my team, but I don’t know how, but it did, y’know . . . .”

You know, y’know?

There is a stereotype in advertising about clients that says if you present three ideas, the client will always pick the worst one. This is unfair to the many talented and creative brand marketers out there, but here we get a peek at where a stereotype like this germinates.

Brands hire ad agencies in order to create ideas that they themselves would never think of. While a measure of collaboration is appropriate, there also needs to be trust. Pepsi should’ve trusted its partner.

It all began by watering down a joke. As Patti said about seven million versus 700 million, “It’s not as funny, just like the kid wasn’t as funny, and it led to a disaster.” 

Do what you say

I’ve been beating this drum for years, along with many others, that brands need to remain vigilant in really making sure their actions reflect their words.

So if you advertise that it only takes seven million Pepsi points to get a Harrier Jet, with no disclaimer at all whatsoever? You better be ready to make good on it.

Both Pepsi’s former chief operating officer Jeff Mordos and Swette rolled their eyes at any suggestion that this was a legitimate offer. Neither conceded on camera to creating this monumental mess. At one point Swette tells viewers, “We didn’t take it that seriously. We saw it as just part of our overall sense of humor, and we expected the public to act that way.”

That argument may have been good enough for Judge Kimba Wood (whom real 90s heads will remember for her brief moment in the spotlight as a proposed attorney general for President Clinton, before being ensnared in Nannygate), who ultimately judged in favor of the corporation in the now-landmark case Leonard v. PepsiCo, but in the court of brand image, it’s important to remember that spirit of the law and the letter of the law aren’t always the same thing.

Can you imagine this happening today? The public flogging that Pepsi would take over social media would be unrelenting, with undoubtedly millions of TikTok videos dissecting the ad like a sugar water Zapruder film.

Marketers should always think very carefully about their expectations of the public—and be ready for any outcome. If a worst case scenario unfolds, don’t use those expectations as a crutch. Which leads us to the third and final lesson.

Lead with generosity

Another 1990s-born consumer point-collection game was McDonald’s Monopoly, which was infamously scammed and subject of its own TV treatment in 2020, with HBO’s six-part docuseries McMillions. So it’s pretty easy to be cynical and see Leonard’s claim as an attempted cash grab by legally exploiting a corporate advertising loophole. But that cynicism shouldn’t be any brand’s starting point.

Pepsi scoffs at Leonard’s claim from the jump, initially sending him coupons for a couple free cases of Pepsi, and then eventually sues him. This is not how you treat a fan of your brand.

It’s be a bit like if Wendy’s had told Carter Wilkerson to f— off and go buy his own nuggets. Or instead of celebrating Nathan Apodaca’s longboarding Fleetwood Mac tribute, Ocean Spray tried to sue him for trademark disparagement. Face it, the Harrier Jet fight probably would’ve led to a trending hashtag #JetforJohn.

After Leonard balked at the coupons, Pepsi dragged him in front of a patronizing platoon of lawyers and offered him about $1 million to back off. This only insulted and emboldened Leonard to keep fighting, which put him on every major TV network across local news, talkshows and more, making Pepsi look like the Galactic Empire of the Cola Wars.

Let’s imagine for a second that instead of patronizing Leonard, the brand instead rationally explained its own mistake, and then offered to bring Leonard in as a collaborator, giving him prize money, a lifetime supply of Pepsi, and a ride in a Harrier Jet? Not only could the brand reap a round of positive PR, it’d have great material for another ad.

Whatever Pepsi’s offer could’ve been, it’s clear that the low-ball offer and how it was delivered really sparked Leonard’s anger and gave him the stamina to take his fight into the years ahead. Hearing Leonard describe it, it’s clear that the brand could’ve resolved things much more quickly and easily, if it had come to the table with some humility and generosity towards its own fan, a self-proclaimed member of the “Pepsi Generation.”

In fact, that opportunity hasn’t expired, all these years later.

At a time when brands are scrambling for branded content to entertain us in ways that interruptive advertising often fails to do, here’s a Netflix series that currently sits on the streamer’s Top 10 list in 28 countries with the brand name right in the title.

There’s got to be a pitch somewhere on current Pepsi CMO Todd Kaplan’s desk for a 2023 Super Bowl commercial that ends with John Leonard in a Harrier Jet. And if not, there should be.

Fast Company

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