THE COLA CONTEST WITH 600,000 WINNERS

DECADES AGO, PEPSI’S NUMBER FEVER PROMOTION CAPTIVATED CONSUMERS AND PROMISED TO END COKE’S DOMINANCE IN THE PHILIPPINES. BUT AN ERROR AT A BOTTLING PLANT LED TO DISASTER

- JEFF MAYSH

MARILY SO, A WOMAN IN her early fifties with graying hair, runs a sari-sari store out of her one-room home in a concrete building beside a railway track in Manila. In the steamy heat of a summer afternoon, shirtless children appear at her window clutching coins. With a kind smile, she serves them warm bottles of water and Royal Tru, one of a few sodas she displays alongside tiny shampoo sachets and single cigarettes. There’s one brand she refuses to sell. If someone asks for a Pepsi, her expression sours. For more than 28 years she’s nurtured bitter resentment against the company. “I didn’t have a job back then,” she says, starting in on her Pepsi story.

It was 6 p.m. on May 25, 1992, and So was among the 70% of Filipinos watching the Channel 2 evening news. Then 23, she was living in a wooden shack beside the tracks with four children under 5. Pepsi was about to announce the winning number in a promotion that had gripped the Philippines’ 65 million people. Her husband, a house painter, had spent their last centavos on special “Number Fever” bottles of Pepsi, hoping one of the three-digit numbers printed on the underside of the caps would match one of the winning numbers locked inside a vault.

Across the Philippines’ 7,641 islands, ads had promised people “You could be a millionaire.” A million pesos, about $68,000 in today’s dollars, was the largest prize available, 611 times the country’s average monthly salary at the time. The published odds of winning that amount were 28.8 million to 1, but Pepsi had already minted 18 millionaires. They appeared in its ads, real as day. One, a bus driver named Nema Balmes, became known as Mrs. Pepsi after joking that drinking cola put her husband “in the mood.”