Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? is a story definitively not of our times. Not just because it has its genesis in the “cola wars” between market leader Coke and brash upstart Pepsi but because by the standards of 2022, the stakes – apart from the financial, which are really never more than notional throughout – are so remarkably low for everyone involved.
The story is simple. Certainly too simple for a four-part series with a total run time of 147 minutes, though I suppose you could argue if you were really bored (and you might be at several points in this tale) it is playfully mimicking the empty calories and bloating effects of the carbonated beverage at its heart. But the story runs thus: in 1995, Pepsi puts out an ad for merchandise that can be exchanged for Pepsi points collected from drinks cans and bottles – a few hundred get you a T-shirt, 1,400 get you a jacket and so on. And at the end of the ad, it claims you can earn a Harrier jump-jet for 7m points. The every kid who has been collecting the merch is shown landing on his school lawn and grinning: “It sure beats the bus!”. What the ad didn’t show was any kind of disclaimer saying that this wasn’t true. No small print anywhere said that Pepsi would not be providing a $32m militarised aircraft to anyone who managed to collect 7m points.
