Trailer For PEPSI, WHERE'S MY JET? The 90s-Set Doc About Pepsi Offering a Harrier Jet as a Prize
If you were around in the 90s, chances are you remember Pepsi’s marketing campaign where they offered up a harrier jet as a prize! Well, there was a college student that actually “won” the prize, but he never got it! Netflix has produced a documentary series titled Pepsi, Where's My Jet?, and it tells this crazy story.
Pepsi’s marketing gimmick was executed to compete with Coke and it involved getting "Pepsi Points" to buy "Pepsi Stuff". You got these points every time you bought cans of Pepsi products and one of those prizes was supposed to be a harrier jet.
I remember collecting these points! This is the synopsis for the doc:
The year was 1996, and the cola wars were raging. Despite Pepsi’s celeb-soaked advertisements, Coke still held the bigger market share, so the second-place brand decided to roll out their biggest campaign ever: Called "Pepsi Stuff," it featured a soon-to-be infamous commercial implying if you just bought enough of their products, you could use "Pepsi Points" to purchase sunglasses, leather jackets… and maybe a Harrier jet? Pepsi execs assumed the astronomical "price" of the military plane was set high enough to indicate it was a joke, but college student John Leonard instead saw it as a challenge, and decided to call their bluff. Enlisting the help (and funding) of mountaineering buddy Todd Hoffman, Leonard hashed out a plan to score the grandest prize of all – even if it never existed in the first place. Shot in a rollicking, irreverent style and soaked in the music and culture of the mid-’90s, Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? sits down with Leonard, Hoffman, the ad's creative team, and a truly unexpected cast of tangentially-involved public figures to tell the legendary tale of the kid who sued Pepsi over a fighter jet, and became the hero of a new generation.
I love that a doc was made about this! There’s no doubt it’s going to be entertaining and it’s going to be fun to take a trip back in to the 90s!
Pepsi, Where's My Jet? was created by and directed by Andrew Renzi (Fishtail, They Fight, Ready for War, The Curse of Von Dutch: A Brand to Die For). It will be released on Netflix starting November 17th, 2022.