That Time Coca Cola Spent $100 Million Intentionally Filling Its Soda Cans With Fart Water

this video is brought to you by audible unlock six months of audible plus for 4.95 per month by visiting audible.com forward slash brain food or texting brain food to 500-500 conceived in early 1990 the magikarn campaign was supposed to be the spearhead of a massive summer promotion that the kola giant dubbed the magic summer of 1990. in a nutshell the promotion involved hiding cash prizes ranging from five to five hundred dollars as well as some other goodies such as coupons for free coke inside of 750 000 of the several hundred million cans of coke that would be distributed during the summer as part of the campaign co-created and patented a unique mechanism that as soon as the can was opened would eject the prize inside via a spring-loaded mechanism coked up the cans magicans in order to ensure people didn't end up with waterlogged prizes the part of the can containing the affirmation mechanism was sealed off and the reservoir that was left was filled with chlorinated water to make the weight of the can approximate the same as a normal full can of coca-cola as a final precaution in case of leaks coca did ammonium sulfate think a rotten egg smell aller a stink bomb to the water in the reservoir so that if it did leak customers would smell the noxious odor and wouldn't drink it like that time the company tried to sell bottled tap water to the british public that coca-cola insinuated was filled with semen problems began to arise before the promotion ever started the first negative press surrounding the campaign came from the fact that coca-cola decided to announce it by mailing out sample magic hands to journalists in march of that year remember these cans contained as much as 500. in cash or vouchers for free coke so it wasn't long before some journalists began questioning the ethics of sending what essentially amounted to under the table cash to members of the media in exchange for reviews and publicity unperturbed coke went right ahead and began entering magic hands into circulation a few weeks later with the massive campaign blitz officially starting on the 7th of may pre-campaign promotions also involved circulating paper cups with prize stickers on them at various fast food chains and giving away free tickets to see new kids on the block who coke spent a pretty penny sponsoring to perform a string of concerts throughout the summer and just in case you forgot new kids on the block yes this campaign was happening in the 1990s almost immediately after the campaign began coke began receiving complaints from customers about defective magicands resulting in smelly soggy pop-up prizes other magic cans both leaked and had a faulty pop-up mechanism resulting in complaints about the foul-smelling and foul-tasting liquid inside of regular coke cans from customers who weren't aware of the campaign and actually tried to drink the stuff as it turns out coke had failed to adequately test the magican mechanism and as a result an estimated one percent of well over a hundred thousand distributed at the time didn't work they also inexplicably didn't mention the promotion anywhere on the cans themselves which would have at least tipped people off about what was going on the real nail in the coffin for the campaign came when news broke that a young boy called zachary gendron had supposedly been hospitalized after accidentally ingesting the liquid inside of a magic can over the years this aspect of the match can saga has been widely embellished with various sources saying that young zachary was rendered seriously ill or even killed by the noxious liquid in reality zack was never in any danger the water inside of magic hands though foul smelling was perfectly harmless containing less chlorine per ounce than the concentration found in a typical swimming pool further contemporary news reports indicated zachary did not actually swallow the noxious liquid but immediately spit it out as for his widely reported hospitalization this was sort of true but not because there was anything wrong with him you see zach's parents weren't aware of the magican promotion and when their son spit out the drink and complained that his coke smelled and tasted bad they took a look what they found was indeed a stinky liquid that contained some foreign object inside black had received one of the aforementioned faulty cans that both leaked and had a failure in the spring-loaded mechanism his mother robin later stated knowing nothing about the promotion we thought it might be a case of product tampering so they rushed their son to the hospital and called the police zach was quickly discharged when knowledge of the campaign came to light and the police discovered that the suspicious foreign object in the can was a five dollar bill according to news reports zach was more worried about losing his five dollars his mother wanted to frame it but ultimately gave it to him when he objected than he was about the liquid in the can however the damage was done as things like child hospitalized after drinking from a can of coke more at 11 makes for a better news bite than worried parents take child to hospital child completely fine rumors quickly spread that some cans of coke contained a deadly substance that had killed at least one child coke entered damage control mode and paid for full size advertisements in 50 major newspapers as well as airtime on most major networks alerting the public that a negligible number of cans were defective and contained water that smelled noxious but were otherwise completely harmless removing the 120 000 or so magic hands that were already on the shelves was impossible because the magic hands were indistinguishable from normal cans of coke not marked with any special serial number or the like a week later faced with ever-growing negative publicity and the rumor mill churning out outlandish stories akin to those often spread about on halloween you can see our video has anyone ever actually poisoned or put razor blades or needles in halloween candy for more on that quietly ended the summer of magic promotion just three weeks after the campaign that invested 100 million dollars in had started to rub salt in the open wound coke's eternal rival pepsi launched a nearly identical campaign soon after only instead of stuffing cans full of a water that smelled like it came from the sewer and a complicated mechanism that held physical money pepsi released cool cans that had a number printed on the bottom inside that customers could quote to a toll-free number to see if they'd won a prize besides being much simpler and cheaper to implement such campaigns often see most prizes unclaimed allowing the company to promise much bigger prizes than they have to deliver so pepsi won coke and nil at least on the surface you see as with the fiasco of coke trying to get rid of its original flavor in favor of new coke which we'll get to in the bonus facts in just a bit this all ended up working out for the company despite the negative press coke sales during the three weeks of the controversial campaign spiked to record levels at the time apparently the saying there's no such thing as bad publicity really is true and speaking of publicity how about a word from our fantastic sponsor audible now you may have seen me talk about audible on this channel before it has the largest selection of audiobooks in the world bar none it's a great resource for absorbing a good book without having to sit in front of the hearth and read it from cover to cover which is how everyone reads books i've recently been listening to the book rebel ideas by matthew syed it's a great listen and i found it because i previously enjoyed his earlier audiobook black box ideas both of those are great and you can get one of those absolutely for free if you click the link below and sign up for audible right now there's never been a better time to try audible specifically it's premium membership package called audible plus it comes with all the great perks of audible in addition to thousands of exclusive audio books podcasts and other pieces of original content and because it's audible plus you can forget all about those pesky ads after all there's nothing worse than having to sit through an advert when you're in the middle of listening to something so if you're interested in taking advantage of audible plus i've got good news for you you guys can take advantage of audible's current holiday offer and grab a six-month audible plus membership for just 4.95 a month and with the amount of content available on an audible that really is a total steal audible is the best go get it now visit audible.com brain food or text brain food to 500-500 and now for a bonus fact ever wonder why coca-cola arguably the most popular drink brand in the world in the late 20th century decided to stop selling its number one product coca-cola and instead give people a completely different product in its place well wonder no more now before we get into the real reason for torpedoing their best-selling product let us debunk the conspiracy theory that coca-cola was trying to swindle people into accepting high-fructose corn syrup over sugar in their drink by pulling the new coke stunt the truth of the matter is that already allowed bottlers to use high fructose corn syrup in coke for about five years before they introduced new coke before they even thought up the idea to make new coke most made the switch pretty quickly because of the drastic cost savings initially coca-cola allowed a 50 corn syrup substitution and by about six months before the introduction of new coke nearly every major bottle of coca-cola was using 100 high fructose corn syrup rather than sugar or a mixture of the two so those who claimed they could taste the difference because of the high fructose corn syrup after the return of the old coca-cola actually had already been drinking it with high fructose corn syrup in most cases long before new coke came around now funnily enough coca-cola did consider not announcing that they were switching to new coke with a plan to just very gradually change the flavor but they ended up deciding that this was too risky because if someone noticed it might become a huge news story and hurt sales from the bad publicity of trying to trick their customers so what really was the motivation for switching to new coke and killing their world world-famous previous product coke had steadily been losing ground to pepsi and by the early 1980s taste tests done by coca-cola and pepsi showed that most people tested preferred pepsi over coke further if not for coke's exclusive contracts with many restaurants and vending machine vendors pepsi would have been drastically outselling coke as it was in supermarkets and other locations where people had a choice coca-cola thus set about changing their formula to come up with something that people would prefer over the original coke and pepsi specifically they created new coke based on their dark coke formula diet coke was extremely popular right from its debut rocketing up to the third most popular cola after pepsi and coke within just a few years of its debut even though it was a new flavor and not a drink flavor based on regular coke as the name seems to imply thus as taste tests showed that more people preferred the taste of diet coke to regular coke they decided to primarily just take out the artificial sweeteners in diet coke and substituted in high fructose corn syrup with a few more minor modifications they succeeded in creating a new apparently tasty drink this wasn't a case of them not doing their due diligence on whether it was better than the original coca-cola they knew full well how big of a thing it would be to abandon their old formulation as such they ran numerous tests which showed the vast majority of people preferred the new formulation over the old and it also beat out pepsi by a decent margin what went wrong is still partially up for debate but the heart of the issue is basically the nostalgia factor and that they'd spent nearly a century marketing their product as something you can't live without and then they took it away people had apparently taken this message to heart while the taste tests made new coke look great they never explicitly asked the question in any of their tests would you care if we switched in this new formulation of coke and got rid of the old they didn't do this because they didn't want people to know they were developing a new formulation at all they did ask a very similar question that subtly implies the previous question and the results should have clued them into the descent they asked tasters who had liked it would you buy this new flavor if it were coca-cola while the majority said yes about 10 said no and got angry about the subtle implication of getting rid of coke while this is a small percentage the problem ahead was illustrated in that these 10 were very vocal about their descent and had a tendency to try to convince other testers that they should switch their answer to no two often successfully this is exactly how it played out when new cook was introduced as well her first sales were up a significant amount over the previous year even more than cochola expected and according to surveys run by coca-cola most people preferred the new flavor over the old just as importantly the majority of existing coke drinkers continued to buy coke at the same levels as they did before further most of those few customers they lost weren't switching to pepsi they were simply just not drinking coke anymore coca-cola stock went up and things were looking really good but then the vocal minorities started kicking up their heels complaints trickled in and the angered coke fans started enlisting the aid of the media soon this trickle developed into a flood one man gay marlins even started the old cola drinkers of america organization to lobby for the return of old coke or at least to try and get coca-cola to license out the formula to someone else the fact that in blind tests mullins himself picked new coke over old coke didn't stop him from attempting to sue coca-cola over the switch either and continue his campaign the dissenters started convincing others many who had never even tried new coke decided they hated it before even tasting it primarily because they were upset at the fact that the original coke was no longer available finally just three months after new coke was introduced the public outcry forced coca-cola to release the old formula under the name coca-cola classic so why did they get rid of coca-cola classic in the first place rather than just introducing new coke as a separate drink right off the bat there were a few reasons but the big one was because the market for cola drinkers at the time was shrinking fast and by introducing another coke substitute having introduced diet coke in 1982 they feared rightly so it would split the market for their product with many people who would have drunk coca-cola classic now drinking new coke this would allow pepsi to take the top spot by a good margin allowing pepsi to not only claim taste tests showed people preferred pepsi but also to boast about how pepsi was the most popular soft drink in the world coca-cola was unwilling to give this marketing advantage to pepsi so decided to get rid of the original coke in favor of new coke after all every test they ran showed people preferred the new formulation anyway saw what could go wrong despite the switch not working out the way they had hoped it did end amazingly well after this fiasco coca-cola classic instead of continuing its steady decline began to take back market share over both pepsi and new coke this was despite the fact that when people were blind taste tested they almost universally picked both new coke and pepsi as better tasting than coca-cola classic although some hypothesized that the taste tests here are flawed because they only gave people small sips thus the sweeter tasting pepsi and new coke would perform better whereas when drunk normally might be too sweet and so coca-cola would win in these cases those who hypothesized this as the reason for coke losing out in the taste tests tend to state the pepsi's steady rise before this fiasco was not due to superior taste but from their superior marketing particularly to youth whatever the case while the whole thing was a fiasco that nearly sunk the company initially within six months of the return of classic coke coca-cola sales had risen at double the rate of pepsi and it continued to climb thus the blunder ultimately was a huge part of why coca-cola was able to re-establish itself as the most popular cola in the world sometimes doing something stupid can really pay off as coca-cola's marketing team has proven over and over again so i really hope you enjoyed that video if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe also check out our fantastic sponsor audible and thank you for watching

Channel: Today I Found Out

Views: 139,755

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Keywords: today i found out, tifovidz12, tifo, awesome, facts, didn't know

Id: nkUsRUbN9qg

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020