How A Failed Pepsi Contest Once Incited A Nationwide Riot

Pepsi has had a long and sometimes controversial history with promotions over the years. They were famously sued for not providing a customer with a Harrier Jet after he collected enough points under the rules of the Pepsi Points contest in the 1990s. In 2017, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Pepsi ran a campaign featuring Kendall Jenner alleviating police tensions by handing a cop a can of Pepsi as crowds cheered. In real life, it caused major backlash. But even that controversy was nowhere near as dark as what happened in the early 1990s during the Numbers Fever campaign in the Philippines. By the time it ended, several people had died.

The ad campaign, part of the Cola Wars to get ahead of Coca-Cola, was a very simple one. Buy a bottle of Pepsi and look under the cap for a three-digit number. A winning number would later be announced on the news. If you matched the number, you could win one million Philippine pesos. At the time, that was about $68,000 U.S. dollars. The average yearly income in the Philippines was closer to $1,200. This was a literal fortune. It was nearly equivalent to 60 years' salary. Reports claimed that over half the country, more than 32 million people, bought Pepsi bottles to try to win.

On the big night, the number was drawn: 349. The population of the Philippines erupted in euphoria. 600,000 people had a cap that said 349. But it was never supposed to be the winner. It was the generic loser number printed on most caps. Something had gone terribly wrong, and it would soon become Pepsi's most misguided campaign ever.

The contest was already teetering on the edge even before the draw. People had been stealing winning caps from previous draws, as a few millionaires had already been crowned. A pair of Pepsi salespeople had already been murdered.

When Pepsi realized that an error had occurred, they scrambled. First, they tried to change the winning number. Then they claimed only caps marked 349 with the correct security code would qualify. Later, they offered people a prize of 500 pesos for their winning caps, which worked out to about $18. That meant more than half a million people, many living extremely hard lives, who had thought they had just become rich, lost everything just as quickly. People took to the streets and began to riot, protesting Pepsi. Trucks and bottling plants were vandalized, and a $400 million lawsuit was filed.

The riots were violent and tragic. A homemade explosive bounced off a Pepsi truck and killed a teacher as well as a five-year-old girl. Three Pepsi employees were killed by a grenade that exploded in a warehouse. The violence continued for months as legal solutions were pursued, though there was ultimately no winning outcome.

In the end, many people accepted Pepsi's offer of a small cash settlement. Those who filed the larger class action lawsuit exhausted all their legal avenues when the Supreme Court ruled that they were not entitled to anything. These days, the story is just one of those random facts about soda most of us never knew.