The man who sued Pepsi for not giving him a $32 million fighter jet has revealed how he feels about it all now.
Back in the mid-1990s, Pepsi made a commercial in which it told people they could collect ‘Pepsi Points’ with each purchase they made.
It said they could exchange those Pepsi Points for products like sunglasses, jackets and even a fighter jet if they collected enough of them.
That commercial found itself at the center of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, and now the man at the heart of that lawsuit is speaking out.
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The man who sued Pepsi over a fighter jet
John Leonard had built up quite a collection of Pepsi points in the form of buying and collecting, spending around $700,000 on enough points to win the AV-8 Harrier II jump jet.
Unfortunately for Leonard, the Pepsi commercial was satirical.
Pepsi said the ad was clearly made in jest, at least the part of it in which they claimed they would give someone a jet, and dismissed Leonard’s Pepsi points.
Leonard was very unhappy with this response and felt he was entitled to his AV-8 Harrier II jump jet.
Leonard said that the drink company was swindling him out of his fighter jet, so he took the company to court.
Leonard was slapped with some more bad news when the court ruled that no reasonable person could see the prize as genuine.
Now, some 20 years later, Leonard is once again making news, this time by way of a Netflix documentary.
He said he knew a lot of people called him an opportunist at the time, but said very much took the whole thing seriously.
“Back then, I wholeheartedly thought that we were going to get the jet,” he said.
What does he have to say about it all now?
While past John Leonard was convinced that he was going to get the jet and that he would win the case if he sued the soft drinks company, 48-year-old John Leonard saw himself through more mature eyes.
“What I struggle with today is how can I have really thought that I was going to get the jet? I’m 48 years old now, and I’m now looking back on it like: what kind of d***** were you, man?”
John Leonard is now a park ranger for the National Park Services and lives in Washington DC without an AV-8 Harrier II jump jet to his name.
PepsiCo has had some ill-fated advertising campaigns, but this one really takes the biscuit.
Now, it’s an iconic and haunting reminder to corporations that you need to clarify jokes in the small print.
Netflix
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