The world of marketing is confusing at times, it’s highly regulated in what can and can’t be said but most advertising requires the audience to take things with a pinch of salt and apply some common sense, but what happens when you take things literally?

Someone who you could ask about taking advertising literally is John Leonard, the man who took on Pepsi and the man whose story inspired the new Netflix series ‘Pepsi Where’s my Jet?’ after his unusual response to a promotional campaign.

The year was 1996 and Pepsi launched a loyalty scheme called ‘Pepsi Points’. This scheme was touted at the time as Pepsi’s biggest marketing campaign yet, estimated to cost the company $200 million to run.

The scheme worked by customers earning points from purchasing Pepsi products that could be put towards memorabilia such as a t-shirt for 80 points, a denim jacket for 400 points and a Harrier Jet for 7 million points.

If you thought that sentence was scarcely believable then join the rest of the world bar one but in the Pepsi advertising campaign they said exactly that, a $33 million Harrier Jet appeared to be 7 million Pepsi Points.

The vast majority of those who saw this advert thought it was a joke from Pepsi to generate a bit of attention but never actually believed you could win a plane but for 21-year-old aviation enthusiast and business student John Leonard this was the opportunity of a lifetime.

However, collecting 7 million points seemed an impossible task, it appeared he would need to buy 16.8 million cans of Pepsi at around $4 million to complete but luckily for Leonard there was another way.

The terms and conditions stipulated that only 15 Pepsi Points needed to have been collected from cans and bottles with the rest purchased for 10 cents each from Pepsi, this reduced the cost of the jet to a still prohibitive but more feasible $700,000.

In the following weeks and months, Leonard pursued this idea: creating a business plan, fiendishly researching advertising laws, and approaching investors to back his audacious plans.

On the 28th of March 1996, after securing financial backing from wealthy people he was connected to, Leonard mailed off a cheque to Pepsi for $700,008.50 and requested his jet.

I’d imagine the response in Pepsi head office was one of perplexion although they were not fazed by this offer and returned the cheque with some Pepsi vouchers stating that the jet in the advert was ‘fanciful’.

At this point, many would’ve just given up but not John Leonard. He formed a team of lawyers to back him up and began to start a legal challenge against Pepsi, their advertising agency BBDO and the notion that, “No reasonable person would agree with your analysis of the commercial.”

What started out as a humorous marketing campaign had now become a fierce court battle attracting media attention from all over the world as Pepsi fought for $88,162 in legal fees and Leonard wanted his jet.

A three-year court battle ensued which ultimately boiled down to whether an marketing campaign can be considered a contract. US law did not consider advertisements to be considered in contract law and as the value of the transaction (should it have happened) would be greater than $500 then it would have had to be agreed in writing (which it wasn’t).

For these reasons (and that for most it was glaringly obvious that the plane idea was a joke), the court ruled unanimously in Pepsi’s favour and Leonard did not get his jet.

Despite the controversy, Pepsi deemed the ‘Pepsi Points’ campaign to be by far the most successful marketing efforts they’d run with the fizzy beverage brand coming out on top in the legal fight without massively hurting their battle with CocaCola.

The story now lives on through a Netflix series titled ‘Pepsi, Where’s my Jet?’ that tracks the David vs Goliath story intertwined within a marketing campaign.

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