In 1995, Leonard was a 20-year-old student near Seattle in the United States, where he was coaching little league football and dreaming of having a successful business. But, as a courageous and adventurous young man, a commercial from Pepsi changed the course of his life. Leonard was set to win a military-grade Harrier jet for an insane amount of Pepsi Points. 

As the 90s were all about the cola wars, and in a bid to steer Gen Xers to choose Pepsi over Coca-Cola, the brand introduced Pepsi Points, which could be redeemed for Pepsi merch. Pepsi Points suddenly appeared everywhere, getting customers to drink the beverage religiously. 

What could Pepsi Points buy?

In order to understand the difficulty of buying merchandise with points, basic maths needs to be applied. The amount of points a customer would receive includes:

• A fountain drink = one point
• Two-litre bottle = two points
• 12 pack = five points

After months of saving for points (similar to Qantas Frequent Flyer members) customers would be able to buy the following:

• Baseball caps = 60 points
• T-shirts = 80 points
• Mountain bikes = thousands
• And the prize that took Leonard to court, a military grade Harrier jet = a whopping 7,000,000 points

The commercial did not include any fine print, disclaimer or legal notice telling viewers it was a joke. 

“I started thinking, geez, how could you actually make this work,” Leonard said in the Netflix series. 

“But I can’t make it happen. And I have had to find a crazy partner in the deal. And luckily, I happen to know somebody that fit the bill.”

But Leonard was on a mission to get the jet, and rang up his friend Todd Hoffman and pitched his idea, of which he was immediately interested to be a part. 

How was it possible?

Leonard was set to pay for numerous warehouses, trucks and drivers to purchase the millions of Pepsi bottles needed to get the seven million points. But the estimated cost would have exceeded over $3.4 million – this set Leonard and Hoffman back to planning. This led Leonard to find a loophole in the fine print, that Pepsi Points could be purchased for ten cents a piece. This fueld their plans and a $700,008.50 cheque – ready to win the top prize. 

But weeks after sending the cheque to the Pepsi headquarters, Pepsi responded saying the inclusion of the Harrier jet in the commercial was nothing more than a joke. But neither Leonard nor Hoffman wanted to take no as an answer. They recruited a lawyer, Larry Schantz to send a letter demanding Pepsi to stick with their arrangement.

The response by Pepsi

The brand counter-responded to the letter by filing a lawsuit against Leonard and Hoffman, asking the court for a declaratory judgement stating that it had no obligation to provide them with a Harrier jet. 

However, Schantz filed a countersuit arguing that Pepsi was obligated to produce the jet, as there was no fine print or disclaimers in their commercial. 

Shortly after this, Pepsi decided to change the ad twice. The first time they changed the number of points to win the jet from 7,000,000 to 700,000,000 and the second time they followed the number with a “Just Kidding”.

Soon after, Pepsi offered Leonard and Hoffman a settlement of $750,000, but Leonard refused as he was still on a mission to claim the jet.

“Now, sure, [I would have settled], but I still get a kick out of the fact that I had the chutzpah at that time to actually come to that conclusion. Probably wasn’t the smartest decision I’ve ever made in my life,” says Leonard.

Another lawyer, Michael Avenatti, joined the case but ultimately, the judge ruled in favour of Pepsi, saying no reasonable person would think a Harrier jet was attainable by claiming Pepsi reward points. 

The duo could not receive their military jet, but they made history as they changed the ways of advertising, with disclaimers now an integral part of many commercials. 

Netflix is offering subscriptions at the cost of $6.99 per month, with the offer of four to five minutes of ads per hour. The video quality will also be capped at 720p.

This comes as the streaming platform faced declining subscribers all year. But finally, the decline has come to an end. 

The company has doubled its subscribers, adding 2.4 million to its database. The data indicated that 100,000 of the new accounts were from the US and Canada, outlining a mature and saturated market where Netflix has found it difficult to attract new customers.

Australia’s subscriber base revealed a growth of 1.4 million active subscribers. Currently, Netflix has 223.1 million global subscribers. It predicts it would add 4.5 million subscribers in the final quarter of 2022.

Netflix released a letter on 18 October 2022 to its shareholders stating: “after a challenging first half, we believe we are on a path to reaccelerate growth.”

It announced that the company believes there are more options for users, especially more price conscious consumers, since global inflation rising “will translate into meaningful incremental income.” 

Additionally, the introduction of the new profile feature will be able to get users off free plans and into paying plans, which will increase shareholder value.

Netflix stated “After listening to consumer feedback, we are going to offer the ability for borrowers to transfer their Netflix profile into their own account, and for sharers to manage their devices more easily and to create sub-accounts (“extra member”), if they want to pay for family or friends. In countries with our lower-priced ad-supported plan, we expect the profile transfer option for borrowers to be especially popular.”

Most watched series in the last quarter

Stranger Things season four hit off Q3 as the biggest hit, which generated 1.35 billion hours viewed, becoming the biggest season of an English language series. 

This was followed by The Sandman, with 351 million hours viewed and the latest limited series, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story reaching 824 million hours viewed.