Why Coke's $100 Million Promotion With Fart-Water Cans Failed Almost Immediately

In the summer of 1990, Coke had a big promotion planned that failed almost before it even started. For the promotion, Coke would distribute cans containing coupons or random amounts of money, anywhere from $5 to $500, that would literally spring up out of the can when you opened it. Sounds awesome, right? In reality, the MagiCan promotion, as it came to be known, was doomed pretty much from the get-go. The campaign was plagued by a host of problems, from communication to engineering, but the problems it suffered in 1990 can provide important lessons for us today.

Coca-Cola's MagiCan promotion seemed fairly well thought-out on paper. The MagiCans would have a spring-loaded mechanism inside so the prizes would pop right up when they were opened. 

The cans were filled with chlorinated water for weight, and just so people wouldn't drink the water, they added ammonium sulfate, the stuff that makes farts smell like rotten eggs.

All good ideas, to be sure, except for one small problem: Coke didn't adequately test the MagiCans before sending them out. Even 1% of 100,000 cans meant that 1,000 people got soggy, foul-smelling cash in their MagiCan. 

Worse, Coke didn't do a great job of advertising the promotion, so complaints started to roll in about nasty-smelling, nasty-tasting Coke. Yes, people drank from the faulty cans even though they smelled like rotten eggs.

Although Coke had created 750,000 MagiCans for the promotion, they had to shut it down after about 200,000 had shipped. When rumors started to spread that a boy had been hospitalized after drinking from one of the faulty cans, Coke knew their promotion was over. 

In fact, the boy was fine – he had just been taken to hospital as a precaution by his parents, who worried that somebody might have fiddled with the can.

What a debacle. Learn more about Coke's summer of woe in the video below!

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