In the previous week Pepsi, proud producer of the soda destined to be met with a resounding “ugh … fine,” from Coke ordering aspirants worldwide, decided to develop the fertile fields of worldwide civil unrest into an effective marketing campaign designed to remind you that Pepsi continues to exist.

At the forefront of this new campaign was a commercial featuring model and spokesperson Kendall Jenner, walking away from the trappings of her life as a model to join a passing protest march of indiscriminate intention and “join the conversation” with the other protesters … which culminates in Jenner handing a watchful police officer an ice cold can of Pepsi.

Years from now “join the conversation” will enter the annals of advertising alongside such failures as “race together” and “avoid the Noid.”

“Tone-deaf” was easily the biggest accusation, taking into the account one cannot print the long string of curse words necessary to accurately depict the internet’s collective outrage in a family newspaper.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the internet was outraged; back in the 70s the internet was first conceived as a way to preserve American outrage about consumer goods and TV finales in case of a Soviet nuclear attack.

What may come as a surprise is that this is far from Pepsi’s worst ad campaign.

Question: Have you ever traveled outside of the United States? Anybody that answers “yes” will know that, no matter where you walk across our planet, you are never more than about 10 minutes away from an icy cool Coca-Cola. Coke has the kind of global penetration normally reserved for pandemics. So, if Pepsi was going to wage worldwide soda war with Coke, they were going to have to go global.

Now, since Pepsi doesn’t have Coke’s funding or magical Christmas bears, it took them a little longer to reach into the pockets of every person on the planet. So it wasn’t until 1989, a full one hundred and one years since its launch as Pepsi-Cola, that they were able to enter the 12th largest soda market in the world: the Philippines.

Quick aside: Pepsi wasn’t Pepsi until 1898, in was created in 1893 and sold under the aggressively unlikable name “Brad’s Drink” until cooler, non-Brad heads prevailed.

Now, you could buy Pepsi in the Philippines before 1989, in fact Pepsi had a larger market share than Coke in the 1970s … because they were in league with the brutal and corrupt dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Pepsi made a lot of money in the Philippines during the Marcos regime, but somehow they “lost” a reported $90 million due to what former Pepsi-Cola International spokesman Kenneth Ross called “accounting irregularities and overstated profits,” according to a 1993 article by the L.A. Times.

After years of martial law, numerous suspicious murders and a presidential election so fraudulent it would make North Korea blush, Marcos, his wife Imelda, and a few loyal sycophants were allowed to escape the throngs of rioters and protesters, board a plane bound for a Andersen Air Force base in Guam and eventually found his way to Hawaii.

For some reason the Philippine people decided that, after the yoke of a corrupt dictatorship was off their collective neck, maybe it was time to celebrate with a new soda.

Coke’s market share shot up to a massive 75 percent of soda consumption, with Pepsi now reduced to a paltry 17 percent, behind something called Pop-Cola.

Pepsi, naturally wanting to distance themselves from, you know, the decades of dictatorship and corruption that had previously offered a welcoming environment for Generation Next, created a subsidiary, Pepsi Philippines, and started marketing the Philippine people. Hard.

Print ads, TV ads, radio commercials, Pepsi even sponsored a professional basketball team called the Pepsi Hotshots in 1990; they were not about to give up their hard-earned position in a valuable market just because of some silly misunderstanding with a totalitarian kleptocracy.

Then, a breakthrough: In 1992 Pepsi launched a new ad campaign called “The Number Fever.” It was a basic “check under your bottle cap” contest, but this one offered the beleaguered, revolution-weary people of the Philippines a once-in-a-lifetime chance to win a million Philippine pesos! Tax free!

That comes to about $40,000; life changing money for anyone, especially a Philippine citizen in 1992 when they had a per-capita GDP of $815.

Pepsi was flying off the shelves. Pepsi’s market share skyrocketed up 40% in a matter of weeks. People all over the Philippines eagerly awaited the night when they would announce the winner of the million peso prize live on TV; all you needed was the right 3-digit combination of numbers on your bottle cap and you were headed to easy street!

So, on May 25, 1992, after an estimated 31 million people had participated, the winning numbers were read on the nightly news; if your bottle cap read “349” then you just became a millionaire.

Somebody had just won the million peso prize … in fact, quite a few somebodies had won, because Pepsi had accidentally printed far, far too many “349” caps.

How many? 800,000.

800,000 winning caps, at $40,000 a cap, comes out to a grand total of $32 BILLION. For a little perspective the then-recently exiled dictator Marcos was accused of stealing $10 billion from the national coffers.

Then Pepsi said they wouldn’t be paying any of the cap-holders.

The riots were quick, devastating, and sustained. For months trucks were burned, protests were held, 689 civil suits and more than 5200 criminal complaints were filed against Pepsi.

For their part, Pepsi International started airlifting their people out of the Philippines, staffing Pepsi delivery trucks with armed guards, and releasing statements that they “will not be held hostage to extortion and terrorism.”

My question, regarding the armed guards on the delivery trucks: Who was still drinking Pepsi at this point?

Pepsi had become soda non grata in the Philippines; Pepsi hatred was so rampant the former Pepsi Hotshots were renamed the 7-Up Uncolas.

At a hastily planned meeting at 3 a.m. at HQ, Pepsi Philippines executives produced a mea culpa; they would offer any winning bottle cap holder $20 in lieu of the millions.

Turns out Pepsi still had to shell out roughly $10 million since 486,170 cap-holders came forward for their $20, which I assume they promptly spent on a few cases of Coca-Cola’s newest flavor of soda: Spite.

So, just an overall tragedy. They still sell a lot of Pepsi in the Philippines, but the local bottlers are now owned mostly by Netherlands and Korean based companies. And the 7-Up Uncolas are now called TNT KaTropa, they’re owned by a telecom company.

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That Kendall Jenner commercial was tacky, but let’s all just be thankful they didn’t promise to make anybody a millionaire.

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Copy Editor Wes Burns is a Sunday columnist. The views expressed in this column are personal views of the writer and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the T-R. Contact Wes Burns at 641-753-6611 or wburns@timesrepublican.com.