We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 6,284,187-week series, Wiki Wormhole.
This week’s entry: Pepsi Number Fever
What it’s about: A contest where everyone was a winner… with tragic results. In 1992, Pepsi Philippines started printing numbers, 001-999, inside bottle caps, with numbers corresponding to prizes that were announced on TV nightly. It was a huge success at first… until a misprint put the million-peso ($40,000 USD) winning number on 800,000 bottles, resulting in rioting, lawsuits, and a massive debacle for Pepsi.
Biggest controversy: Those 800,000 winning bottle caps weren’t technically winners. Each contest bottle caps had a security code alongside the number for confirmation; the misprints had no code. But that mattered little to people who were convinced they had won. Panicked Pepsi executives held a 3 A.M. meeting and worked out a compromise, where the misprint bottle caps could be exchanged for a 500-peso ($18) consolation prize. Although 486,170 people accepted, it was a lose-lose for Pepsi. The payouts cost the company 240 million pesos ($8.9 million), on a contest that initially had $2 million USD set aside for prizes.
Strangest fact: Pepsi has a massively popular brand they sell everywhere except the U.S. The Number Fever contest included PepsiCo’s four biggest sodas—Pepsi, 7-Up, Mountain Dew, and orange soda Mirinda. While Coke has Fanta and Keurig-Dr. Pepper has both Sunkist and Orange Crush, Pepsi doesn’t have a signature orange soda in the U.S. The company started selling Mirinda in Spain in 1959, and it’s become a massive global brand, popular everywhere from Mexico to India to Egypt, and variants with flavors ranging from other citrus fruits to passionfruit, banana, hibiscus, and tamarind. Pepsi apparently attempted to push Mirinda in the U.S. in the ’70s, even commissioning Jim Henson to do a series of commercials with the Cookie Monster-esque “Miranda Craver.” But Mirinda seems to be the soccer of soft drinks, catching on everywhere but here.
Thing we were happiest to learn: The contest was initially a huge success. Pepsi had run similar promotions with great success across Latin America, and the contest got Filipinos excited enough that Pepsi’s market share went from 4% to nearly 25% overnight. (No word as to how far it dropped after disaster struck.)
Thing we were unhappiest to learn: While some people accepted the consolation prize (and accepted an honest mistake on Pepsi’s part), some people were angry. And some people were very angry. Pepsi drinkers who felt they had been cheated formed a consumer group, the 349 Alliance (349 was the misprinted winning number), which organized boycotts, protests, and numerous lawsuits. In an sentence where the word “but” is doing some Olympic-caliber heavy lifting, “most protests were peaceful, but three [Pepsi] employees were killed by a grenade thrown into a warehouse in Davao, and a mother and child were killed… by a grenade thrown at a Pepsi truck.” Thirty-seven Pepsi trucks were “pushed over, stoned, or burned.” One sitting Senator suggested rival bottlers were behind the attacks; a popular conspiracy theory at the time was Pepsi itself staged the attacks to frame the protestors as terrorists.
Also noteworthy: The Pepsi Number Fever case went to the Philippines’ Supreme Court. Hundreds of civil suits and thousands of criminal fraud complaints were filed in the wake of “the 349 incident.” One court awarded plaintiffs 10,000 pesos each in “moral damages.” Three of those plaintiffs appealed for more money; the appellate court raised the award to 30,000 pesos. Pepsi then appealed that decision, and in 2006, 14 years after the initial incident, the Supreme Court ruled Pepsi was neither liable for the misprinted prizes nor further damages. And in a Simpson-esque “let’s never speak of this again,” touch, the Justices also ruled, “the issues surrounding the 349 incident have been laid to rest and must no longer be disturbed in this decision.”
Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: While the 349 incident was a genuine accident, the Hoover Free Flights Promotion was just astoundingly poor planning. In the early ’90s, Britain’s ubiquitous vacuum cleaner company was being hit hard by a recession and competition from newcomer Dyson. So they ran a promotion in which anyone buying more than £100 worth of Hoover products would get two round-trip plane tickets to the U.S. Naturally, the plane tickets costs several times as much as the vacuum cleaner, and Hoover had to scramble to stop the already-out-of-control promotion. The British public viewed the promotion as “buy these incredibly cheap airline tickets and get a free vacuum cleaner into the bargain.” Hundreds of thousands of people took advantage, and neither Hoover nor the airline were prepared for the demand (the airline eventually folded). Hoover tried to make the application process for the airline vouchers as complicated as possible to dissuade people, but trans-Atlantic flights were going for £600, so £100 plane tickets and a free vacuum cleaner were too good a deal to pass up. Like Pepsi, Hoover lost their shirts and also angered the public when they tried to renege on the too-good-to-be-true giveaway.
Further Down the Wormhole: One of the two grenade attacks in the wake of the 349 incident took place in Manila. The Philippine capital was founded in 1258 as Maynilá, and has grown to be both the most densely populated city on earth, with 1.78 million people in 107,520 square miles, and also a sprawling metropolis, with a metro era of 12.8 million people. Among other things, the city hosts the country’s only sizable baseball stadium—Rizal Memorial. The sport was popular in the first half of the 20th century but has declined to the point where the country’s last professional league folded in 2012. But Filipino and American baseball share some history; the first two players to hit home runs at Rizal were Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, on a world tour 1934. (The Bambino was at the end of his career, as he left the Yankees in ’34, playing a disastrous ’35 season for the Boston Braves that saw him retire by Memorial Day.) That season was largely forgotten by the time the Sultan Of Swat was inducted into the Hall Of Fame a year later, standing alongside some of baseball’s greats, including a previous star for Boston with a terrific nickname, Old Hoss Radbourn, a 19th-century pitcher who holds what’s considered baseball’s most unbreakable record. We’ll examine his astounding career on the field, and colorful exploits off of it, next week.
62 Comments
Two things, I live in the UK and have never heard of Mirinda orange soda. Also, a similar thing happened with the Daily Mail tabloid in the early 80s. They ran a bingo game in the paper with big money prizes, £100000 from memory, and misprinted the numbers one day making nearly every reader a winner. At the time Mail readers were far too genteel to riot so I think it was mostly strongly worded letters to the editor.
It was the Daily Mail, so presumably they just blamed the typo on immigrants.
Since it’s the Mail I’m now questioning whether or not bingo is a real thing.
I’d like to read those letters. Angry but polite letters to the editor seem to be an amusingly unique British form of literature.
One of my wife’s (American) coworkers told us recently that she gets most of her international news from the Daily Mail. My wife assumes she was joking, but that wasn’t my impression…
Pretty sure they don’t sell Mirinda in Canada either, or else it’s a very niche product. Never heard of it either. But that still leaves most of the world.
We have Mirinda in Hong Kong.
The Hoover one was absolutely bizarre. In the UK now, we have this weird situation where people still say ‘hoover’ when they mean ‘vacuum cleaner’, but next to nobody buys vacuum cleaners made by Hoover.
I realised I truncated that comment a bit assuming people would know what we were talking about, sorry.
…And at least part of the reason for that must be the Great Hoover Free-But-Turns-Out-A-Bit-Too-Free Flights Debacle
“hoover” as a verb makes me think of snorting coke (never Pepsi).
Or consuming anything too rapidly, via suction. Hoover, damn.
I’d say it’s similar to using “Kleenex” for tissue, but your hard pressed to find any other brand besides them to use.
I’ve been the proud recipient of emails or letters complaining about the ‘misuse’ of Portakabin, Biro and Tupperware in various publications, which were all career highlights.
They suck.I mean, they literally do not suck. Which is what sucks about them. God knows how they cornered the market for so long.
My parents bought a Hoover in ‘91. It got handed down to me for college in ‘98 and I just got rid of it like 2 years ago. Only thing I ever had to do was replace the bags, it didn’t even wear through a single belt. I think it cost like $100.
I remember an early interview where Jeremy Dyson stated his ambition for a future where kids said “I can’t go out now, Mum says I’ve got to Dyson my room.”I have a Dyson. It’s shit at picking up hair, and when you’re using the hose/nozzle to do the stairs, it’s still wastefully sucking under the base.
Isn’t Jeremy Dyson the non-acting one from League of Gentlemen?
Shit! You’re right – James is the vacuums-and-ineffective-hand-dryers guy.
Like Pepsi, Hoover lost their shirts and also angered the public when they tried to renege on the too-good-to-be-true giveaway.
I’d hardly call an 8.9 million dollar settlement by Pepsi ‘losing their shirts’, even by 1990’s economic standards.
Sure, they may have fallen out of favor as the drink of choice in the Philippines but were in no danger of folding.
He doesn’t mean figuratively, he means literally.For example, here is Pepsi’s VP of marketing after the settlement. Pepsi execs not only had to work without shirts on the beach, they were subjected to experimental treatments with Pepson Radiation and becme 50 feet tall.
Certainly negligible to the multinational PepsiCo, but I think national and regional distributors are compartmentalized in terms of finances and management (see also the origins of Fanta, and the cola shootin’ wars in Thailand), so I’m not really sure how big a hit that might have been to Philippine Pepsi.
I bet the record you are talking about for Old Hoss Radbourn is his 60 pitching wins in 1884, but the most unbreakable record in baseball has got to be Connie Mack’s 76 ties as a manager.
I think unbreakable records are boring. What I find more interesting are records that are breakable but have stood for a long time anyway. One example that comes to mind for me is that the record for most passing yards in an NFL game by a single QB is still held by Norm Van Brocklin in a game from 1951.
Thanks for some brain jerky there. 554 yards is a lot, yeah, but I mean, the game has shifted so much toward the passing game since then, you’re right, it’s astounding that record still stands.
To put in perspective how long ago that was: the team he did it against was the New York Yanks.
I had to look them up. Wow, real TIL territory. 🙂
The baseball version of this would have to be the single-season record for doubles of 67, set in 1931 by someone named Earl Webb, in one of the two seasons in his brief career in which he was a full-time player. The record has stood for 90 years now but never struck me as particularly unbreakable. More recently, another appropriately random player, Nick Castellanos, put up 58 in 2019 to crack the all-time top 10 without anyone taking much notice.
Wow, that’s a great stat. And not that out of reach, given that six other players have broken 520 yards in a game.
One weird thing about that is that none of those were more that 527 yards, 27 less than Van Brocklin’s record.
And two players hit 527! It’s like you can come 2-3 completions away from the record and no further.
And they were both playing for Houston, although not the same team.BTW, one sports-related figure I think would be a good Wiki Wormhole is Rollen Stewart(even if you don’t know his name, you’ll know who he is).
Speaking of airline flights, there was also the guy who converted pudding purchases into frequent flyer miles, although his process was vastly more complicated than the Hoover deal.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Phillips_(entrepreneur)
Wasn’t that a thing in “Punch Drunk Love”?
I shot a promotional video a while back for a local historical society, and they gave us access pretty much to their entire collection, one item being a doctor’s medicine kit from I think the 1920s or thenabouts. All of the recreational stuff was missing, including the cocaine, but there was a vial of pepsin powder, and never in my life did I have a greater urge to steal something. There also was a set of a leather driving cap and goggles and duster and gloves that I really wanted to steal, but in that case a tiny glass bottle is more realistic.Anyway, the point of this story is that even in the 1920s people preferred Coke to Pepsi.
Cake adds life?
This wasn’t even Pepsi’s first botched promotion involving specially-printed bottlecaps. In 1983 they ran a promotion called the Name Game, offering $5 per letter to people who could spell their surname using letters printed inside of bottlecaps. Whoever planned the promotion figured they could keep a cap on how many prizes they gave out by limiting the number of vowels printed, showing they were unfamiliar with the surname Ng.The real winner of the promotion was one Richard Vlk, though, a diabetic who couldn’t even drink Pepsi but who took out ads offering to split the prize money with anyone who helped him complete sets. He ended up redeeming 1393 sets for a total of nearly $21,000. And in one of the all-time great examples of petty revenge, Pepsi mailed each one of the 1393 $15 checks separately.
Gee, my name has three letters. They’re repeated, but it’s only three. I bet I could’ve done that.
My last name is Cobb. I could have cleaned up.
Only if you could have changed one of the consonants to an ‘o’ for each set.
Couldn’t you just legally change your name to something ludicrous and short and easy and just clean the fuck out of Pepsi?
Yeah, but as an inception expert, you could have just implanted the idea in a Pepsi exec’s mind to give you the money directly.
Are any of them vowels?
Is your last name Ass?
“And in one of the all-time great examples of petty revenge, Pepsi mailed each one of the 1393 $15 checks separately.”This had to have been the inspiration for the Seinfeld episode where Jerry kept getting all these endorsement checks from the same company but they were minor amounts. I also have to hand it to Pepsi though, that is an amazing form of “you wanna screw us? well, screw you too!!”.
I thought they were royalty checks from an appearance on a Japanese tv show – they kept using a clip of him or something, and the exchange rate meant that the checks were tiny.
Nah, fuck Pepsi. He played by the rules of their dumb contest, it’s all on them.
Um… I was hoping this would be an article about Coke.
Sorry, we only have articles about Pepsi, is that okay?
with 1.78 million people in 107,520 square miles this confused me so i looked at the wiki, it’s 107,5200 per square mile… huge difference in density… 😉
“Pepsi fever,” better I guess than “Mr Pibb plague,” or “Dr Pepper hemorrhagic fever”
I was thinking it was just a branded euphemism for diabetes.
Mountain Diverticulitis? Orange Crushed Pelvis? Mellow Yellow Fever?
Irn-Bru-enza?
You don’t even want to know the kinds of diseases you get from store brands.
A fellow Cautionary Tales fan?
Pepsi has tried a few different orange sodas in America. Along with the aforementioned Mirinda, they also released Slice. They’re lemon lime sodas are even more numerous with Teem, Slice, Storm and now Sierra Mist. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone ever order a Sierra Mist.
It’s a little weird how nearly all of the lemon-lime sodas on the market are Pepsi (7-Up is its own company, but Pepsi always used to distribute them). Like, why compete with yourself? Or is it a multi-pronged strategy against Sprite? The classic pincer movement!
Are you by any chance white? I do pizza delivery part time, and black customers order the shit out of Sierra Mist.
I just had a Sierra Mist today. I live in a tiny town that only has a Pizza Hut for pizza and when I ordered stuff last week, I ordered some 20 oz drinks. I or they messed up and I got twice the drinks. I actually wanted an orange Crush, but they were out, so I got Sierra Mist. Apparently it has real sugar instead of HFCS. It’s not bad. I prefer Sprite.
Yep. Slice, introduced in the mid-80s, which were quite good compared to Sprite, Fanta, Mirinda, 7-Up…
Pepsi owes reparations to the Philippines. and a decent orange soda to Americans.