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>Pepsi's promotion also suffered from negative publicity when it was discovered that if two specific Cool Cans were stacked in a certain way, the designs appeared to spell out the word "SEX".

Makes me wonder why there was never a moral panic around Post Alpha-Bits breakfast cereal or Campbell's Alphabet Soup.

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The allegation toward Pepsi was that the can design was intentionally done so that—when six-packs were stacked in the grocery store—some portion of them would line up to spell "SEX".

There was (still is?) a mini-moral panic around subliminal advertising, and Pepsi trying to do that wasn't well received.

You can judge for yourself here: https://i.imgur.com/H1OV1iC.jpg

I'm not sure Alpha-Bits or the soup have had labels with naughty words on them.

I’d have to see more of the can design but this looks weak to me. The 'S' and 'E' are each one color. The ‘X’ is both red and blue, and seems to only exist because part of a 'P'(?) intersects the background. But what do I know?

Then how do you explain the fact that you just bought a case of Pepsi, despite not having done so in years?

But yeah, I'm leaning toward this being a coincidence rather than a masterful scheme to juice sales. The 'X' isn't even fully-formed. It is a "P", and the can designer was probably just plonking down random letters from "PEPSI" in the background.

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