Red is complimentary to cyan.

If the cyan were switched with yellow, the can would appear blue.

Also, it's not our brains creating the red, it's our eyes. They get exhausted of seeing the cyan and replace it with red.

It's not marketing, just colour theory. The same idea has been used by painters for ages.

Oh weird, I assume this is just because the white is relatively red compared to the cyan, right? As in if you took any image and coloured it in the same way then it would also look red.

Nonsense. My phone screen uses red, green, and blue to make up each pixel. The white pixels have their red component all the way at full brightness. Therefore there is a lot of red in the picture.

You could also see this by opening up the image and looking at the red channel which would not be completely black.

Jokes on you, I'm moderately red green colorblind so I wouldn't realize it if there was red present

I think there's something more going on here than just "marketing". Because if you look at the tiny thumbnail in the OP it's very clearly red, and you can even load that thumbnail into an image editor and zoom in to see slightly reddish pixels.

So something happens when scaling this image that actually results in a red hue, and I don't think my computers image scaling algorithms are also falling for "marketing". I would guess it's actually some kind of sub-pixel trick that makes it seem like there's colors there which aren't, and that's why the image scaling algorithms also reveal the same colors you see.

Your mind compensates for the teal which makes the white look red.

That's wild as fuck. If I actually concentrate on the "red" it becomes white and then only becomes red again if I look away for a moment.

Still red with no logo.

When its small thumbnail I can see it but when I look at the full size image I appear to be able to turn the effect off at will.

I need to grab a color dropper but I am sensing a little warmth from the White even when I zoom in

Is this because our brains have been programmed to see Coca Cola can as red? Or does it have something to do with the way the black and white boxes are organized? (I.e. if it were a sprite can, it would still be red)

It’s actually all just white light at different wavelengths, which tricks your brain into seeing different “colours”.

She's right.

I'm colorblind this trick doesn't work with me

I only see the red when its small, in the thumbnail its red, but when I open the image its very black and white.

The white has more red in it than green and blue, so that's probably the cause of the illusion.

The "white" is actually very pale pink. At least on my phone screen

Here is an 8 minute video that goes into more depth on how this works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FjjJha7HMI

If you zoom in to see that it's black and white, and then zoom back out again, it stays black and white. But if you look away for a bit to forget, maybe change the angle you're looking at it, it turns red again.

This is one of those actually cool optical illusions