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.

Here's another version

The poster in the image is the original source for the coke can op posted btw

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

...I was gonna say it took until it was shrunk down to the thumbnail to see red, but nope, it actually has red in it in the thumbnail.

Guess this is specific to how often you see cans of coca-cola?

Here, I put the image through a ditherer (only available colours are black, cyan, white). I don't see any red at all now.

[edit}

Actually, that "red" is mostly just gray so I played myself here. Still, the luminosity must be closer to red before I detect it as red, white doesn't do it.

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.

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.

Still red with no logo.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

She's right.

Weird but if I focus my mind so to say it appears white but then if I relax then again red