‘Pepsi weren’t counting on a dreamer like me’: the student who sued a soft drink giant for a $23m fighter jet
In 1996, PepsiCo – then known for creating the young, cool, carbonated drink of a generation – made an incredible mistake. The company had just launched its Pepsi Points scheme, in which customers could save Pepsi labels and redeem them against Pepsi-branded merchandise. Sixty tokens would get you a hat. Four hundred and you’d get a denim jacket. But in the commercial accompanying the launch, Pepsi went further, joking that anyone who collected 7m labels would be eligible for a brand new Harrier jump jet. The mistake? Pepsi forgot to add any small print pointing out that it was a joke.
That one oversight now forms the basis for a wildly entertaining Netflix series, entitled Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? It tells the story of John Leonard, a Washington State community college student who decided to take Pepsi at its word. After quickly realising that buying 7m cans or bottles of Pepsi would be prohibitively expensive, Leonard saw a disclaimer revealing that, rather than collecting labels, consumers could buy Pepsi Points for 10 cents each. A $23m Harrier jump jet for just $700,000? That was the bargain of the century. Over four episodes, the show recounts one young man’s determination to take on a multinational corporation to get what an advert had promised him.
“John had this kind of Spielbergian quality about him when he was younger where it was just, like, anything is possible,” recounts Andrew Renzi, the show’s director, over a riotous fourway Zoom call with Leonard and Todd Hoffman (more on him later). “I don’t know if you have ever seen the film Being There,” Renzi adds, referring to the Peter Sellers satire about a gardener who accidentally works his way into the corridors of power, “but I had this thing in my head where John Leonard at 19 years old is Peter Sellers.”
“Yeah. So that’s pretty close to accurate,” Leonard interrupts.
Renzi sighs. “I forgot to mention that John is opinionated,” he says.
Renzi was initially offered Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? as a work of fiction. But after tracking down Leonard, by then in his mid-40s and working as a park ranger in Alaska, he realised that the truth would be more entertaining.
“It was a long time ago,” Leonard continues. “And I just kind of wanted to keep it back there, as something funny that happened a long time ago.” That changed when the Netflix series Tiger King became a lockdown hit, and people started looking for more weird historical stories to turn into documentaries; various producers came sniffing around. “There were some real schmucky people that would lay on this really thick, used-car salesman, Hollywood type of thing. But Renzi sent me an email. And of all the different emails I got, it felt really sincere. It didn’t seem like it was the same old thing of, you know, blowing smoke up your ass. But simultaneously, Todd and I had a conversation. He said something along the lines of: ‘This is a cool story. It needs to be told, and it needs to be told by the right person.’ He said: ‘When I die, I’d be happy to have this be on my epitaph.’”
Now let’s introduce Hoffman, the secret sauce of the whole crazed scheme. A charismatic millionaire, then in his 40s, Hoffman had befriended Leonard on a mountaineering trip. And when Leonard realised he needed $700,000 to force a fighter jet out of a fizzy drink company, Hoffman was the first person he turned to. To everyone’s surprise, Hoffman was keen.
“John brought this to me, and told me the story,” he recalls. “We looked at the videotape of the commercial, and I just kept looking at it over and over and over and going: ‘That is absolutely a reckless ad put out there by a major corporation that knows better.’” After that point, the game was afoot. Pepsi’s defence throughout was that the ad was clearly a joke. At one point during the series, a Pepsi spokesperson mentions that, while millions of people watched the advert, only one person actually tried to redeem the jet offer. It is possible nobody else went as far as Leonard in their attempts to claim the prize, but he points out that he first heard of Pepsi Points when a father