It's rewritten paragraph-by-paragraph, probably automatically using "rewriting tools" that blog spammers use to plagiarize articles. You can tell because the story follows the same threads from paragraph to paragraph.
good catch, though probably not rewritten automatically. There's too much "context awareness" going on. If it was auto-written, it was then heavily edited by a native english speaker.
also after skimming the atlas obscura article, I have to say I wish I read that instead. Better prose and a lot more images than the plagiarized version.
I'm still bothered by this case. While I don't think that PepsiCo should've been forced to buy and then sell (for points) a Harrier jet, the fact that there were no consequences for the ad just kind of baffles me. If you look at any ad targeting youth markets from the time period, they had the same nonchalance; sure, they're not pitching a jet, but that just seems like a terrible argument.
I'm not sure about the Pepsi ad, but in basically every false advertising case the company accused goes for the "no reasonable person would believe that" defence.
For example, Apple advertises an iPhone as "twice as fast for half the price"? They say no reasonable person would believe that [1]
Or Vitaminwater says the drink "could promote healthy joints, support optimal immune function, and reduce the risk of eye disease"? They claim no reasonable person would believe vitaminwater was a healthy drink [2]
I mean, this seems like a hole in the law that you can drive a truck through.
It's similar to the question "Can you sue someone for that?" Sure, anyone can sue anyone for anything, but you probably won't win stupid cases.
Any competent lawyer is going to reach for every available defense that seems vaguely plausible, but they're unlikely to win. A quick search makes it look like although Coca Cola only had to pay a $1.2M fine in this case the defense that no reasonable person would believe their advertising was rejected.
> Coca-Cola fought back arguing that no reasonable consumer could be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage but last year a federal judge rejected this defense.
Regarding the Apple case, note that Apple's initial defense covered virtually every possible defense in such a case. That wasn't a corporate statement, and indeed another of the defenses was that any claims about the product were fair and accurate.
This is just a standard legal tactic to have every option available (including puffery) if the suit moves forward. And for that claim any reasonable judge would have disagreed but they can include it if they want to really pursue it.
And that lawsuit was dismissed because the limiting factor were flaws with the AT&T network, not the device.
I agree with the overwhelming sentiment of your claim, but at the same time there are consumers who go out of their way to be "mislead" because it can be a profitable venture.
> I'm not sure what think is wrong with the ad besides making an offer they didn't want to make good on?
Personally, I think that's always wrong and this should be by default judged in favour of the customer taking them up on an offer. Advertisements aren't random remarks thrown off the cuff.
It was obviously a joke, that's what the court decided.
I'm kind of upset when some company does something that requires a tiny bit of common sense and faces consequences on the grounds that people with heads full of air get the wrong idea. We are humans, with judgment, not mindless robots, and I believe society should acknowledge that.
Sure, here, the target is high school kids, but what is the risk? It's not like one of them is going to buy a jet fighter. If there is a problem with that ad, it is that it encourages an unhealthy diet by making kids drink Pepsi.
Also note that here, we are talking about a guy who was able to build a scheme that is far from obvious. He even wrote a $700k certified cheque for that. Two possibilities: either Leonard was too insane to handle that kind of money, or, more likely, he tried to exploit an loophole for profit. In some countries, that could be considered fraud.
In 2005 Pepsi had a campaign where you would get a Sony laptop priced at 2000 EUR by buying some 850 EUR net worth of soda.
When people started sending in their bottle labels en masse, it turned out that the company never expected anyone to actually aim for the prize. Pepsi representation tried to weasel out by changing the rules thrice. In the end, they had to bow down to the consumer protection officials and sent out a newer generation Vaio as they could not source enough of the model they advertised.
That puts me in mind of Hoover's infamous 1990s UK flight promotion. It started off OK, buy £100 of Hoover products, get a free flight to Europe. Not many redeemed the offer. Then they added global destinations. Loads redeemed the offer. People were buying a Hoover and giving or throwing it away, or leaving it in the shop to get (much more expensive) flights to the US.
Hoover made £30m in extra sales, and had to spend £50m on flights, and unknown compensation. TV programmes were made, court cases filed, board execs were fired and Hoover UK sold to the Italians.
> Hoover made £30m in extra sales, and had to spend £50m on flights, and unknown compensation.
This is impressive, but it seems to understate Hoover's problems pretty dramatically. The Wikipedia article says this:
> at this point the consumer response increased enormously, as Hoover was offering around £600 of airline tickets for an outlay of just £100. Customers opted to purchase the cheapest product that was enough to satisfy the £100 requirement, with some not even bothering to pick up the product they had purchased. The Hoover factory had to switch to seven-day working and hire additional employees to meet the demand for the cheapest qualifying vacuum cleaner.
This sounds like a lot of additional expense in labor and materials, all of which was basically wasted.
It ruined them financially and as a brand in the UK, hence the eventual sale. In part because they couldn't buy all the flights claimed, but they also couldn't afford to. The vast majority got no tickets, and had to go to court to seek compensation as they initially tried delaying and avoiding tactics. The £50m was for the small minority who did get tickets.
As a brand they were constantly appearing on the news, and consumer affairs programmes for weeks, months eventually years. Hoover people were flying in from the US, etc.
All because they expected a similarly low takeup rate as their earlier European offer.
I thought the point of the story was the front-and-center statistics, 30 million pounds in additional sales outweighed by 50 million pounds in expenditures on airline tickets.
But that sounds like a 20 million pound loss most of which was wealth transfer (from Hoover to you!) rather than wealth destruction. In fact, because of the sideshow in ordering unwanted vacuum cleaners, the loss was apparently much larger and mostly wealth destruction rather than wealth transfer.
Just because someone can afford one doesn't mean it's not clearly a joke that it isn't really the prize for a soft drink competition. The court agreed.
It's a real physical item. Pepsi has lots of money. It is thus reasonable to expect that Pepsi would provide one.
It might be different if Pepsi had offered a flying unicorn, a human slave, psychic powers, a teleporter, a time machine, a genie with 3 wishes, a seat in congress, or a fully operational death star.
The best argument you could make for Pepsi's failure would be that the jet was more restricted at the time. If acquisition hit legal difficulties, the judge should have forced Pepsi to make a substitution of greater cost. It should hurt. For example the Boeing 747 is a real jet that could be purchased freely at the time.
> It's a real physical item. Pepsi has lots of money. It is thus reasonable to expect that Pepsi would provide one.
It was tested in court. They didn't agree this was reasonable. I don't think it would be reasonable either.
Tech people think law is like maths with absolutes - it's not - there's a big test in law of 'come on is that really what a reasonable person would think - use your common sense' and this fails that.
And some of us here disagree the court decision is reasonable.
This isn't "tech thinking in math ways". This is plain and simple ethics: Pepsi purposefully lied to people, by making an offer they didn't intend to honor - and then they weaseled out of it when someone actually took them up on their offer. Offer is IMO completely reasonable, for the reasons 'burfog gives. If Microsoft or Google advertised a contest in which the prize is a Falcon 9, I would consider this a believable offer too, because they can totally afford it, probably just out of margins on the sales increase they'd get for announcing the contest.
Lying to people for your benefit only to later defend yourself with "it was just a joke!" after they take you seriously isn't jesting; it's plain assholery.
> Pepsi a fleet of 17 obsolete Soviet Navy diesel attack submarines along with a decommissioned cruiser, destroyer and frigate, as well as a number of new civilian oil tankers. At a stroke, PepsiCo had become the sixth most powerful navy in the world.
Not sure a bunch of questionable quality / condition ships and some oil tankers would really be the "sixth most powerful."
There aren’t that many powerful navies these days. It’s not like the age of dreadnoughts when countries like Japan and Argentina were getting into naval arms races.
What are the more powerful ones? US, UK, France, Korea?, who else? Japan's SDF was still pretty neutered at the time, China didn't have a navy to speak of, I'm not sure how many other countries would have beaten them at the time. Maybe Egypt?
Here's what I got searching country names searching the pennant list from "Janes Fighting Ships 1988-89". It's limited to "major surface ships", and notably doesn't include the USSR due to their policy of regularly changing pennant numbers. I think it's OK for ballpark purposes.
That's an imperfect metric, but at the time it was a good measure of the destruction potential you had against other navies. 17 attack submarines, even "obsolete" (which probably just means that the US navy and maybe one or two others could counter them) was an impressive force at the time.
Can’t believe they didn’t mention the cherry (pepperoni?) on top: PepsiCo also got Gorbachev to huck some Pizza Hut for them: https://youtu.be/fgm14D1jHUw
>The Soviet ruble was still worthless on the international market
Who controls the currency controls the country. A government forced to barter its warships so a multinational company would continue delivering its soft-drink to its citizens. I wonder if the deliberate sabotage of the Ruble helped usher in collapse.
Actually the Soviet Union was indirectly brought down by the humble FAX machine.
The AFL-CIO from Detroit got friendly with the Polish Solidarity union. During protests the government would shut down communications.
They told the AFL-CIO what they really could use were FAX machines. AFL people and priests smuggled in the FAX machines in their suitcases and with it an alternative communications network was established. During protests they could quickly send information country wide and they hoped the government wouldn't catch on and it worked.
Without the absolute control over information one country after another fell.
Poland was the domino and after it got its freedom one after another the rest of the countries in Eastern Europe gained their independence.
This put immense pressure on the Soviet Union after people in some of its republics like Georgia and the Ukraine decided that they wanted their freedom too.
The military panicked and staged a coup against Gorbachev. It then dawned on the Russians that they could have their freedom as well.
Ehm. I think you should refresh your knowledge about the fall of the USSR.
The Orange revolution in Ukraine and the Rose revolution in Georgia heppened years after USSR felt apart.
In reality the Baltic states were the first to declare independance from the Soviet Union. And it had little to do with Poland.
Source: citizen of Lithuania, the first one to break away.
I grew up in USSR and lived through its disintegration. That's not quite how it went, and it decidedly had nothing to do with fax machines. The bloc disintegration was the consequence of USSR losing control and rotting from inside, not vice versa.
Possibly, but the Soviets were looking to offload the old ships anyway and it might have been easier to requisition the mothballed military hardware instead of materials the population needs.
It depends on the lifecycles of the Soviets' assets because it was a bartering arrangement. Plus, gold could be stolen or skimmed, submarines were discrete units of barter that hopefully arrived in more or less one piece.
One of the problems with a military-focused command economy like the Soviet Union's was that consumer goods were in short supply and often not that high quality even when available. But consumer goods are needed to keep people happy. How to get them? The USSR's ruble was worthless on the world market -- only by exchanging goods could they get them.
Interesting case there, but nowadays big conglomerates like Pepsi and Coke surely have thousands of security contractors on retainer? Then again, they can't exactly order an airstrike against Coke...
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi...
It's rewritten paragraph-by-paragraph, probably automatically using "rewriting tools" that blog spammers use to plagiarize articles. You can tell because the story follows the same threads from paragraph to paragraph.
also after skimming the atlas obscura article, I have to say I wish I read that instead. Better prose and a lot more images than the plagiarized version.
The offer bit is a great opportunity to cite Carbolic Smoke Ball https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Bal...
For example, Apple advertises an iPhone as "twice as fast for half the price"? They say no reasonable person would believe that [1]
Or Vitaminwater says the drink "could promote healthy joints, support optimal immune function, and reduce the risk of eye disease"? They claim no reasonable person would believe vitaminwater was a healthy drink [2]
I mean, this seems like a hole in the law that you can drive a truck through.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2008/12/apple-says-cust/ [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/coca-cola-glacau-vitaminwate...
Any competent lawyer is going to reach for every available defense that seems vaguely plausible, but they're unlikely to win. A quick search makes it look like although Coca Cola only had to pay a $1.2M fine in this case the defense that no reasonable person would believe their advertising was rejected.
> Coca-Cola fought back arguing that no reasonable consumer could be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage but last year a federal judge rejected this defense.
https://www.truthinadvertising.org/tina-org-objects-unhealth...
This is just a standard legal tactic to have every option available (including puffery) if the suit moves forward. And for that claim any reasonable judge would have disagreed but they can include it if they want to really pursue it.
And that lawsuit was dismissed because the limiting factor were flaws with the AT&T network, not the device.
I agree with the overwhelming sentiment of your claim, but at the same time there are consumers who go out of their way to be "mislead" because it can be a profitable venture.
Personally, I think that's always wrong and this should be by default judged in favour of the customer taking them up on an offer. Advertisements aren't random remarks thrown off the cuff.
I'm kind of upset when some company does something that requires a tiny bit of common sense and faces consequences on the grounds that people with heads full of air get the wrong idea. We are humans, with judgment, not mindless robots, and I believe society should acknowledge that.
Sure, here, the target is high school kids, but what is the risk? It's not like one of them is going to buy a jet fighter. If there is a problem with that ad, it is that it encourages an unhealthy diet by making kids drink Pepsi.
Also note that here, we are talking about a guy who was able to build a scheme that is far from obvious. He even wrote a $700k certified cheque for that. Two possibilities: either Leonard was too insane to handle that kind of money, or, more likely, he tried to exploit an loophole for profit. In some countries, that could be considered fraud.
It was obviously a joke. No reasonable person would not see that.
When people started sending in their bottle labels en masse, it turned out that the company never expected anyone to actually aim for the prize. Pepsi representation tried to weasel out by changing the rules thrice. In the end, they had to bow down to the consumer protection officials and sent out a newer generation Vaio as they could not source enough of the model they advertised.
Hoover made £30m in extra sales, and had to spend £50m on flights, and unknown compensation. TV programmes were made, court cases filed, board execs were fired and Hoover UK sold to the Italians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion
This is impressive, but it seems to understate Hoover's problems pretty dramatically. The Wikipedia article says this:
> at this point the consumer response increased enormously, as Hoover was offering around £600 of airline tickets for an outlay of just £100. Customers opted to purchase the cheapest product that was enough to satisfy the £100 requirement, with some not even bothering to pick up the product they had purchased. The Hoover factory had to switch to seven-day working and hire additional employees to meet the demand for the cheapest qualifying vacuum cleaner.
This sounds like a lot of additional expense in labor and materials, all of which was basically wasted.
As a brand they were constantly appearing on the news, and consumer affairs programmes for weeks, months eventually years. Hoover people were flying in from the US, etc.
All because they expected a similarly low takeup rate as their earlier European offer.
Yes I think that's the point of the story.
But that sounds like a 20 million pound loss most of which was wealth transfer (from Hoover to you!) rather than wealth destruction. In fact, because of the sideshow in ordering unwanted vacuum cleaners, the loss was apparently much larger and mostly wealth destruction rather than wealth transfer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PHcdn8R4d4
http://artnalls.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nalls
https://brobible.com/life/article/ret-usmc-art-nalls-harrier...
https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/he-didnt-retire-he-started...
Just because someone can afford one doesn't mean it's not clearly a joke that it isn't really the prize for a soft drink competition. The court agreed.
It might be different if Pepsi had offered a flying unicorn, a human slave, psychic powers, a teleporter, a time machine, a genie with 3 wishes, a seat in congress, or a fully operational death star.
The best argument you could make for Pepsi's failure would be that the jet was more restricted at the time. If acquisition hit legal difficulties, the judge should have forced Pepsi to make a substitution of greater cost. It should hurt. For example the Boeing 747 is a real jet that could be purchased freely at the time.
It was tested in court. They didn't agree this was reasonable. I don't think it would be reasonable either.
Tech people think law is like maths with absolutes - it's not - there's a big test in law of 'come on is that really what a reasonable person would think - use your common sense' and this fails that.
This isn't "tech thinking in math ways". This is plain and simple ethics: Pepsi purposefully lied to people, by making an offer they didn't intend to honor - and then they weaseled out of it when someone actually took them up on their offer. Offer is IMO completely reasonable, for the reasons 'burfog gives. If Microsoft or Google advertised a contest in which the prize is a Falcon 9, I would consider this a believable offer too, because they can totally afford it, probably just out of margins on the sales increase they'd get for announcing the contest.
How many times a day to you ‘purposefully lie’ to people when telling a joke? Do they all sue you?
Lying to people for your benefit only to later defend yourself with "it was just a joke!" after they take you seriously isn't jesting; it's plain assholery.
> Pepsi a fleet of 17 obsolete Soviet Navy diesel attack submarines along with a decommissioned cruiser, destroyer and frigate, as well as a number of new civilian oil tankers. At a stroke, PepsiCo had become the sixth most powerful navy in the world.
Not sure a bunch of questionable quality / condition ships and some oil tankers would really be the "sixth most powerful."
Much like England was a naval power and not a land power.
[1]https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/japan-doesn’t-know-wh...
1. USA 425
2. UK 95
3. Japan 81
4. France 65
5. Taiwan 60
6. China 52
7. Indonesia 36
8. India 35
9. Italy 34
10. Germany, Federal 30
https://www.dropbox.com/s/a74zpbb556lv4mn/ships.pdf?dl=0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Navy#Equipment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Spanish_Navy_sh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Portuguese_Navy...
>making PepsiCo temporarily the sixth-largest Navy in the world.
Who controls the currency controls the country. A government forced to barter its warships so a multinational company would continue delivering its soft-drink to its citizens. I wonder if the deliberate sabotage of the Ruble helped usher in collapse.
The AFL-CIO from Detroit got friendly with the Polish Solidarity union. During protests the government would shut down communications.
They told the AFL-CIO what they really could use were FAX machines. AFL people and priests smuggled in the FAX machines in their suitcases and with it an alternative communications network was established. During protests they could quickly send information country wide and they hoped the government wouldn't catch on and it worked.
Without the absolute control over information one country after another fell.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,159069,...
Sorry for undermining your story btw.
This put immense pressure on the Soviet Union after people in some of its republics like Georgia and the Ukraine decided that they wanted their freedom too.
The military panicked and staged a coup against Gorbachev. It then dawned on the Russians that they could have their freedom as well.
Source: citizen of Lithuania, the first one to break away.
We're used to total fungible value of everything, but in the Soviet Union bartering with what you had to hand was far more necessary.
It depends on the lifecycles of the Soviets' assets because it was a bartering arrangement. Plus, gold could be stolen or skimmed, submarines were discrete units of barter that hopefully arrived in more or less one piece.