Is There Really a Point to Pepsi Aircraft Offer?

PepsiCo. is offering hats, jackets, bikes and other “Pepsi stuff” to people who earn points by saving empty beverage containers. To win a T-shirt, for instance, takes 80 points, or the equivalent of 40 two-liter Pepsi bottles.

But the Web site designers at Delta Designs in Anaheim, perhaps taking one of Pepsi’s television ads a touch too literally, are setting their sights on what is supposedly the biggest prize of the promotion: a Harrier jet that costs 700 million points.

In a Web site designed to spoof the Pepsi campaign, the wags at Delta encourage Web surfers to send them Pepsi bottles and cans in an effort to pool resources and win the jet.

Accumulating 700 million points is mathematically possible--Pepsi said it will issue 7 billion points during the course of its campaign. But the company insists that the Harrier jet spot was a joke.

“I’d say it’s a great spoof on a spoof,” Brad Shaw, a Pepsi spokesman, said of the Delta Designs site. “But rather than redesigning their garage to get a jet, they should rent a warehouse for all the T-shirts and bikes they’ll be getting if they do send in 700 million points.”

There doesn’t appear to be much chance of that. Kerry Garrison, director of Web technologies at Delta, said nobody has sent in any Pepsi bottles or cans yet, and those collected by Delta employees form a rather small pile.

According to an odometer-style counter built into the site, Delta has 699,991,150 Pepsi points to go. The site can be viewed at https://www.700million.com

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Greg Miller covers high technology for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and atgreg.miller@latimes.com.