Michael Jackson, Madonna and the Spice Girls: How Pop Stars Fought the Cola Wars
Michael Jackson, Madonna and the Spice Girls: How Pop Stars Fought the Cola Wars
In 1983, Pepsi-Cola had a problem. Coca-Cola had dominated the global soft drinks market for most of the 20th century. Pepsi had been chipping away at that dominance through its Pepsi Challenge taste tests — blind comparisons in shopping centres that consistently showed people preferring Pepsi when they did not know which drink they were tasting — but turning taste-test wins into market share was a different problem entirely. Pepsi needed something that would make the brand feel like the choice of a generation, not just the choice of people who preferred slightly sweeter cola from a paper cup.
The answer, it turned out, was Michael Jackson.
In November 1983, a year after Thriller had become the best-selling album in history, PepsiCo signed Jackson and his brothers to a five million dollar endorsement deal. It was, at that moment, the largest celebrity endorsement ever negotiated, and the figure was startling enough to reset the whole advertising industry's understanding of what a star was worth to a brand.
What made it remarkable was not only the number. Jackson's managers had gone to Coca-Cola first. Coca-Cola offered one million and declined a full partnership. Pepsi saw it differently. Chief executive Roger Enrico agreed the five million and went further, letting Jackson rewrite the lyrics of Billie Jean as the commercial's jingle — putting the brand inside the music rather than attaching it to a famous face. The rewritten chorus went out to a television audience that already knew every word of the original.
A second deal followed in 1987, worth ten million, supporting the Bad album and tour across more than twenty countries. It was the first celebrity endorsement of that scale to be genuinely global. Pepsi's market share rose. Coca-Cola's fell. The advertising executive who brokered the campaign later titled his memoir Then We Set His Hair on Fire.
The title referred to what happened on 27 January 1984, during filming of the first Pepsi commercial at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The shoot was staged as a concert before a live audience of around three thousand. On the sixth take, as Jackson came down a staircase flanked by pyrotechnics, a charge went off early. The sparks caught his hair, which was heavily gelled and thoroughly flammable, and it went up. He carried on performing for several seconds before he understood what was happening. By the time the crew reached him he had second-degree burns to his scalp.
The cameras filming the commercial captured the whole thing, in front of a live crowd, and it became one of the most discussed events of 1984. Pepsi settled out of court for one and a half million dollars. Jackson gave every penny of it to the Brotman Medical Center in Culver City, the hospital that had treated him, which later named its burn unit the Michael Jackson Burn Center. The commercial ran anyway. The partnership continued another four years. In an irony nobody remarked on at the time, Jackson reportedly did not drink cola at all — his preference was said to be orange Gatorade.
Coca-Cola watched Pepsi's share climb and its own erode, and in April 1985 made a decision that is still one of the most studied mistakes in consumer goods: it discontinued the original formula and replaced it with New Coke.
The reformulation had tested well. People who tried New Coke blind preferred it to both old Coke and Pepsi. The problem was that the blind taste test measured the wrong thing. Coca-Cola was not simply a drink. It was a cultural institution, a childhood memory, an identity. When the company announced the change, the reaction was not curiosity. It was fury. Protest groups formed. Stockpilers cleared shelves of the original. The switchboard at headquarters jammed.
On 11 July 1985, seventy-nine days after New Coke launched, Coca-Cola Classic returned and the original formula was back. Analysts have suggested since, with varying degrees of seriousness, that the whole thing might have been deliberate — a calculated reminder of how much the public loved the original. The company has consistently denied it. The simpler explanation is that a business with decades of dominance failed to understand that taste and identity are different things, and paid for the confusion with seventy-nine days of very public embarrassment.
In 1989, Pepsi signed Madonna for five million dollars to promote the launch of Like a Prayer. The commercial aired on 2 March 1989 — a warm, nostalgic spot with Madonna watching her younger self at a birthday party, the title track running underneath. It was well received. It aired once.
The following day the actual Like a Prayer music video was released. Its religious imagery drew immediate condemnation from the Vatican and calls for a boycott of Pepsi. The campaign was withdrawn within twenty-four hours and the partnership ended. The commercial never aired again.
Madonna kept the five million.
The episode became one of the most-cited cases in advertising education on the risk of attaching a brand to a working artist without visibility of what that artist plans to release alongside the sponsored work. It also generated a great deal more attention for the song and its video than any conventional campaign could have bought.
By 1997 the Cola Wars had reached their Spiceworld phase. PepsiCo signed the Spice Girls to its Generation Next campaign early that year, a partnership that would eventually run to an estimated hundred million dollars, according to the group's manager Simon Fuller in a 2014 BBC Radio 2 interview.
Ninety-two million promotional cans and bottles went out worldwide carrying the group individually and together. In October 1997 they played two concerts in Istanbul sponsored exclusively by Pepsi, with tickets available only through a promotional offer. UK Pepsi sales rose thirty per cent in the single week of that promotion, and across the year Pepsi took a record five per cent gain in cola market share. A promotional single, Step to Me, available only by on-pack redemption, shifted six hundred thousand copies — described at the time as the most successful on-pack promotion in the history of the UK soft drinks market.
At the same moment, in the same month, the group signed with Cadbury for ten chocolate countlines, assorted boxes and seasonal lines including Easter eggs, and with Chupa Chups for lollipops, push pops and dipping candy. In the autumn of 1997 the Spice Girls were simultaneously on soft drinks, chocolate and confectionery packaging — a saturation that had not been attempted at that scale before and has rarely been attempted since.
The Jackson deal set the template for everything after it: music inside advertising rather than beside it, celebrity partnerships at global scale, the idea that a brand could borrow a star's cultural identity rather than simply their face. Madonna established the risk matrix. New Coke established the limits of consumer research — that stated preferences under controlled conditions do not predict behaviour once emotional attachment is involved. The Spice Girls proved that the right partnership at the right cultural moment could move share numbers no conventional advertising could touch.
The brands survived all of it, and Coca-Cola and Pepsi are still the two largest soft drinks companies in the world. But the landscape the Cola Wars helped build — pop stars as brands, brands as cultural actors, the boundary between advertising and art permanently contested — is still the one every drinks and confectionery campaign operates inside.
A post circulates periodically announcing that Coca-Cola and Pepsi have ended the rivalry and are collaborating, usually followed by Lay's asking Doritos whether they should do the same. It is a joke, it has never been true, and enough people check that it is worth stating plainly: there has been no collaboration between them, and there is unlikely to be one.
The truth is closer to the opposite. The two have been more openly combative recently than at any point since the 1980s. Pepsi parodied Coca-Cola's revived "Share a Coke" campaign by putting food pairings on its bottles instead of names. Then it took the Pepsi Challenge to the Super Bowl with an advert built around a cola-drinking polar bear — Coca-Cola's own mascot since 1922 — choosing Pepsi Zero Sugar in a blind taste test and needing to see a psychiatrist about it.
Using a rival's most recognisable character against them is not the behaviour of a company planning a joint venture. The Cola Wars are not over; they have simply moved from television to social media, where the memes travel further than the adverts ever did.
The American soft drinks range at Sweet and Glory includes Pepsi Wild Cherry, Coke Cherry, Coke Vanilla and Coke Orange Cream alongside Fanta in over twenty flavours, Gatorade, Dr Pepper and A&W Root Beer. See the complete American sodas guide for the category overview, the Arizona Iced Tea guide for the brand that defined the nineties drinks aesthetic without signing a single pop star, or Vimto for a soft drink that built a following a mile from our own warehouse with no celebrity budget at all. Browse the full soft drinks range.
No minimum order. Free first parcel on orders over £150 ex VAT (additional boxes £7.10 each). Free pallet delivery over £650 ex VAT. Dispatched from Manchester. Create a free account to browse and order.
How much did Pepsi pay Michael Jackson? Five million dollars in 1983, and a further ten million in 1987. The first figure was the largest celebrity endorsement ever signed at that point. Jackson's managers had approached Coca-Cola first, and Coca-Cola offered one million and declined a full partnership — which is how Pepsi ended up with the biggest star in the world.
What happened to Michael Jackson's hair in the Pepsi advert? A pyrotechnic charge fired early on the sixth take at the Shrine Auditorium on 27 January 1984, and the sparks caught his hair, which was heavily gelled and highly flammable. He carried on dancing for several seconds before realising, and was left with second-degree burns to his scalp. Pepsi settled for one and a half million dollars, which he donated in full to the Brotman Medical Center in Culver City. Its burn unit was later named after him.
Why did New Coke fail? Because the research measured taste and the customers were buying identity. New Coke beat both original Coke and Pepsi in blind tests, but a blind test strips away the label, the memory and the attachment — which was most of what people were actually loyal to. The original formula returned as Coca-Cola Classic seventy-nine days later.
Did Madonna keep the Pepsi money? Yes. Pepsi paid her five million dollars, aired the commercial once on 2 March 1989, then pulled the campaign within twenty-four hours when the Like a Prayer video was released the next day and drew condemnation from the Vatican. The contract had already paid out. She kept the fee and the commercial never aired again.
Did Pepsi and Coca-Cola collaborate? No. The post announcing that they had ended their rivalry and joined forces is a meme, usually shared with Lay's asking Doritos whether they should follow suit. There has never been a collaboration between the two companies and there is no sign of one coming. If anything the rivalry has intensified — Pepsi recently parodied Coca-Cola's "Share a Coke" campaign, then ran a Super Bowl advert featuring a polar bear, Coca-Cola's own mascot, choosing Pepsi in a blind taste test.
Are Pepsi and Coca-Cola owned by the same company? No, and this is the other half of the same confusion. They are separate, competing, publicly listed companies — The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta and PepsiCo in New York. They have never merged, never shared ownership, and compete directly in almost every market in the world. PepsiCo is the larger business overall, but only because it also owns a substantial snack division.
Who actually won the Cola Wars? Neither, in market share terms — Coca-Cola and Pepsi remain the two largest soft drinks companies in the world. What changed was the advertising industry. The Jackson deal established that a brand could buy its way into the music itself rather than sponsor it from outside, and every celebrity partnership since has worked from that template.
Related guides: Best American sodas UK · Dr Pepper and the 23 flavours mystery · Vimto: the Manchester original · E.T. and Reese's Pieces story · Who really owns Willy Wonka? · TikTok candy trends guide
Sources
Marketing Dive - Pepsi Super Bowl LX campaign, January 2026
Food Dive - Pepsi parody of the Share a Coke campaign, October 2025
Contemporary press coverage of the 1984 Pepsi advert and the 1985 New Coke launch
Written by Sharon Wilson, Sweet and Glory. Sweet and Glory has imported American and world confectionery into the UK from Trafford Park, Manchester, since 2015.
In 1983, Pepsi-Cola had a problem. Coca-Cola had dominated the global soft drinks market for most of the 20th century. Pepsi had been chipping away at that dominance through its Pepsi Challenge taste tests — blind comparisons in shopping centres that consistently showed people preferring Pepsi when they did not know which drink they were tasting — but turning taste-test wins into market share was a different problem entirely. Pepsi needed something that would make the brand feel like the choice of a generation, not just the choice of people who preferred slightly sweeter cola from a paper cup.
The answer, it turned out, was Michael Jackson.
The Deal That Changed Everything
In November 1983, a year after Thriller had become the best-selling album in history, PepsiCo signed Jackson and his brothers to a five million dollar endorsement deal. It was, at that moment, the largest celebrity endorsement ever negotiated, and the figure was startling enough to reset the whole advertising industry's understanding of what a star was worth to a brand.
What made it remarkable was not only the number. Jackson's managers had gone to Coca-Cola first. Coca-Cola offered one million and declined a full partnership. Pepsi saw it differently. Chief executive Roger Enrico agreed the five million and went further, letting Jackson rewrite the lyrics of Billie Jean as the commercial's jingle — putting the brand inside the music rather than attaching it to a famous face. The rewritten chorus went out to a television audience that already knew every word of the original.
A second deal followed in 1987, worth ten million, supporting the Bad album and tour across more than twenty countries. It was the first celebrity endorsement of that scale to be genuinely global. Pepsi's market share rose. Coca-Cola's fell. The advertising executive who brokered the campaign later titled his memoir Then We Set His Hair on Fire.
The Fire on Set
The title referred to what happened on 27 January 1984, during filming of the first Pepsi commercial at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The shoot was staged as a concert before a live audience of around three thousand. On the sixth take, as Jackson came down a staircase flanked by pyrotechnics, a charge went off early. The sparks caught his hair, which was heavily gelled and thoroughly flammable, and it went up. He carried on performing for several seconds before he understood what was happening. By the time the crew reached him he had second-degree burns to his scalp.
The cameras filming the commercial captured the whole thing, in front of a live crowd, and it became one of the most discussed events of 1984. Pepsi settled out of court for one and a half million dollars. Jackson gave every penny of it to the Brotman Medical Center in Culver City, the hospital that had treated him, which later named its burn unit the Michael Jackson Burn Center. The commercial ran anyway. The partnership continued another four years. In an irony nobody remarked on at the time, Jackson reportedly did not drink cola at all — his preference was said to be orange Gatorade.
Coca-Cola's Panic: New Coke
Coca-Cola watched Pepsi's share climb and its own erode, and in April 1985 made a decision that is still one of the most studied mistakes in consumer goods: it discontinued the original formula and replaced it with New Coke.
The reformulation had tested well. People who tried New Coke blind preferred it to both old Coke and Pepsi. The problem was that the blind taste test measured the wrong thing. Coca-Cola was not simply a drink. It was a cultural institution, a childhood memory, an identity. When the company announced the change, the reaction was not curiosity. It was fury. Protest groups formed. Stockpilers cleared shelves of the original. The switchboard at headquarters jammed.
On 11 July 1985, seventy-nine days after New Coke launched, Coca-Cola Classic returned and the original formula was back. Analysts have suggested since, with varying degrees of seriousness, that the whole thing might have been deliberate — a calculated reminder of how much the public loved the original. The company has consistently denied it. The simpler explanation is that a business with decades of dominance failed to understand that taste and identity are different things, and paid for the confusion with seventy-nine days of very public embarrassment.
Madonna Keeps the Money
In 1989, Pepsi signed Madonna for five million dollars to promote the launch of Like a Prayer. The commercial aired on 2 March 1989 — a warm, nostalgic spot with Madonna watching her younger self at a birthday party, the title track running underneath. It was well received. It aired once.
The following day the actual Like a Prayer music video was released. Its religious imagery drew immediate condemnation from the Vatican and calls for a boycott of Pepsi. The campaign was withdrawn within twenty-four hours and the partnership ended. The commercial never aired again.
Madonna kept the five million.
The episode became one of the most-cited cases in advertising education on the risk of attaching a brand to a working artist without visibility of what that artist plans to release alongside the sponsored work. It also generated a great deal more attention for the song and its video than any conventional campaign could have bought.
The Spice Girls and the Most Successful On-Pack Promotion in UK History
By 1997 the Cola Wars had reached their Spiceworld phase. PepsiCo signed the Spice Girls to its Generation Next campaign early that year, a partnership that would eventually run to an estimated hundred million dollars, according to the group's manager Simon Fuller in a 2014 BBC Radio 2 interview.
Ninety-two million promotional cans and bottles went out worldwide carrying the group individually and together. In October 1997 they played two concerts in Istanbul sponsored exclusively by Pepsi, with tickets available only through a promotional offer. UK Pepsi sales rose thirty per cent in the single week of that promotion, and across the year Pepsi took a record five per cent gain in cola market share. A promotional single, Step to Me, available only by on-pack redemption, shifted six hundred thousand copies — described at the time as the most successful on-pack promotion in the history of the UK soft drinks market.
At the same moment, in the same month, the group signed with Cadbury for ten chocolate countlines, assorted boxes and seasonal lines including Easter eggs, and with Chupa Chups for lollipops, push pops and dipping candy. In the autumn of 1997 the Spice Girls were simultaneously on soft drinks, chocolate and confectionery packaging — a saturation that had not been attempted at that scale before and has rarely been attempted since.
What the Cola Wars Left Behind
The Jackson deal set the template for everything after it: music inside advertising rather than beside it, celebrity partnerships at global scale, the idea that a brand could borrow a star's cultural identity rather than simply their face. Madonna established the risk matrix. New Coke established the limits of consumer research — that stated preferences under controlled conditions do not predict behaviour once emotional attachment is involved. The Spice Girls proved that the right partnership at the right cultural moment could move share numbers no conventional advertising could touch.
The brands survived all of it, and Coca-Cola and Pepsi are still the two largest soft drinks companies in the world. But the landscape the Cola Wars helped build — pop stars as brands, brands as cultural actors, the boundary between advertising and art permanently contested — is still the one every drinks and confectionery campaign operates inside.
No, They Have Not Made Peace
A post circulates periodically announcing that Coca-Cola and Pepsi have ended the rivalry and are collaborating, usually followed by Lay's asking Doritos whether they should do the same. It is a joke, it has never been true, and enough people check that it is worth stating plainly: there has been no collaboration between them, and there is unlikely to be one.
The truth is closer to the opposite. The two have been more openly combative recently than at any point since the 1980s. Pepsi parodied Coca-Cola's revived "Share a Coke" campaign by putting food pairings on its bottles instead of names. Then it took the Pepsi Challenge to the Super Bowl with an advert built around a cola-drinking polar bear — Coca-Cola's own mascot since 1922 — choosing Pepsi Zero Sugar in a blind taste test and needing to see a psychiatrist about it.
Using a rival's most recognisable character against them is not the behaviour of a company planning a joint venture. The Cola Wars are not over; they have simply moved from television to social media, where the memes travel further than the adverts ever did.
American Drinks at Sweet and Glory
The American soft drinks range at Sweet and Glory includes Pepsi Wild Cherry, Coke Cherry, Coke Vanilla and Coke Orange Cream alongside Fanta in over twenty flavours, Gatorade, Dr Pepper and A&W Root Beer. See the complete American sodas guide for the category overview, the Arizona Iced Tea guide for the brand that defined the nineties drinks aesthetic without signing a single pop star, or Vimto for a soft drink that built a following a mile from our own warehouse with no celebrity budget at all. Browse the full soft drinks range.
No minimum order. Free first parcel on orders over £150 ex VAT (additional boxes £7.10 each). Free pallet delivery over £650 ex VAT. Dispatched from Manchester. Create a free account to browse and order.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much did Pepsi pay Michael Jackson? Five million dollars in 1983, and a further ten million in 1987. The first figure was the largest celebrity endorsement ever signed at that point. Jackson's managers had approached Coca-Cola first, and Coca-Cola offered one million and declined a full partnership — which is how Pepsi ended up with the biggest star in the world.
What happened to Michael Jackson's hair in the Pepsi advert? A pyrotechnic charge fired early on the sixth take at the Shrine Auditorium on 27 January 1984, and the sparks caught his hair, which was heavily gelled and highly flammable. He carried on dancing for several seconds before realising, and was left with second-degree burns to his scalp. Pepsi settled for one and a half million dollars, which he donated in full to the Brotman Medical Center in Culver City. Its burn unit was later named after him.
Why did New Coke fail? Because the research measured taste and the customers were buying identity. New Coke beat both original Coke and Pepsi in blind tests, but a blind test strips away the label, the memory and the attachment — which was most of what people were actually loyal to. The original formula returned as Coca-Cola Classic seventy-nine days later.
Did Madonna keep the Pepsi money? Yes. Pepsi paid her five million dollars, aired the commercial once on 2 March 1989, then pulled the campaign within twenty-four hours when the Like a Prayer video was released the next day and drew condemnation from the Vatican. The contract had already paid out. She kept the fee and the commercial never aired again.
Did Pepsi and Coca-Cola collaborate? No. The post announcing that they had ended their rivalry and joined forces is a meme, usually shared with Lay's asking Doritos whether they should follow suit. There has never been a collaboration between the two companies and there is no sign of one coming. If anything the rivalry has intensified — Pepsi recently parodied Coca-Cola's "Share a Coke" campaign, then ran a Super Bowl advert featuring a polar bear, Coca-Cola's own mascot, choosing Pepsi in a blind taste test.
Are Pepsi and Coca-Cola owned by the same company? No, and this is the other half of the same confusion. They are separate, competing, publicly listed companies — The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta and PepsiCo in New York. They have never merged, never shared ownership, and compete directly in almost every market in the world. PepsiCo is the larger business overall, but only because it also owns a substantial snack division.
Who actually won the Cola Wars? Neither, in market share terms — Coca-Cola and Pepsi remain the two largest soft drinks companies in the world. What changed was the advertising industry. The Jackson deal established that a brand could buy its way into the music itself rather than sponsor it from outside, and every celebrity partnership since has worked from that template.
Related guides: Best American sodas UK · Dr Pepper and the 23 flavours mystery · Vimto: the Manchester original · E.T. and Reese's Pieces story · Who really owns Willy Wonka? · TikTok candy trends guide
Sources
Marketing Dive - Pepsi Super Bowl LX campaign, January 2026
Food Dive - Pepsi parody of the Share a Coke campaign, October 2025
Contemporary press coverage of the 1984 Pepsi advert and the 1985 New Coke launch
Written by Sharon Wilson, Sweet and Glory. Sweet and Glory has imported American and world confectionery into the UK from Trafford Park, Manchester, since 2015.
