Pepsi Number Fever: How Bottle Cap 349 Sparked Riots in the Philippines

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In February 1992, Pepsi Philippines began printing three digit numbers inside the caps of Pepsi, 7-Up, Mountain Dew, and Mirinda bottles. Most prizes were around 100 pesos, but the grand prize was one million pesos, about 40,000 US dollars and 611 times the average monthly salary. Winning numbers were read on television every night, market share jumped from 19.4 percent to 24.9 percent, and executives extended the campaign by five weeks. That extension set up one of the costliest printing errors in marketing history.

On May 25, 1992, the evening news announced the winning number: 349. Only two caps carried that number with the matching security code, but 800,000 ordinary caps had been printed with it too, a theoretical liability of 32 billion dollars. This episode follows what came next: crowds at the bottling plants, a 500 peso goodwill offer, the 349 Alliance, burned trucks, deadly bombings, and a legal fight that reached the Philippine Supreme Court.

The promotion was never a true game of chance. Winning caps were made in fixed quantities, each with a unique security code needed to claim the cash.
Nearly half a million people accepted 500 pesos, about 18 dollars, costing Pepsi roughly 8.9 million dollars against an original prize budget of 2 million.
Protesters stoned, overturned, or burned 37 delivery trucks, and at least five people died, including a school teacher and a five-year-old killed by a bomb in Manila.
About 22,000 people took legal action, and in 2006 the Supreme Court ruled Pepsi was not liable for the amounts printed on the error caps.
Pepsi received the 1993 Ig Nobel Peace Prize, and to be 349'd entered local slang as a term for being duped.

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