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Wherein I Think Way Tooo Hard About a Coke Ad from 1971
It is likely that you have heard of this ad campaign. It is generally regarded as one of the most successful of all time, and as such was featured in the series finale of the TV show Mad Men. But that begs the question of why it was so successful. Perhaps if we can understand the answer, we might understand something about the Baby Boomer generation at whom it was targeted. Or even the Greatest Generation that targeted them with the ad.
Your initial reaction to this ad, if you’re watching it now for the first time, might be something along the lines of, “this looks like Coca Cola organized a cult… and people joined it. Weird.” Maybe that’s not far off. Cults – like ads – recruit members by promising attractive peers and group songs/chants and a happy setting and by implying the necessity of joining them in defiance of some outside evil (war, hunger, minor inconveniences, etc.) If you want world peace and a diverse group of attractive friends? Drink a Coke. It’s the real thing.
The guy who wrote the ad explains (via vintag.es)
“I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)” is a pop song that originated as the jingle “Buy the World a Coke” in the groundbreaking 1971 “Hilltop” television commercial for Coca-Cola and sung by The Hillside Singers. “Buy the World a Coke” was produced by Billy Davis and portrayed a positive message of hope and love, featuring a multicultural collection of teenagers on top of a hill appearing to sing the song.
The popularity of the jingle led to it being re-recorded in two versions; one by The New Seekers and another by The Hillside Singers, as a full-length song, dropping references to Coca-Cola. The song became a hit record in the US and the UK.
The idea originally came to Bill Backer, an advertising executive working for McCann Erickson, the agency responsible for Coca-Cola. Backer, Roger Cook and Billy Davis were delayed at Shannon Airport in Ireland. After a forced layover with many hot tempers, they noticed their fellow travelers the next morning were talking and joking while drinking Coca-Cola.
Backer later wrote: “In that moment, (I) saw a bottle of Coke in a whole new light… (I) began to see a bottle of Coca-Cola as more than a drink that refreshed a hundred million people a day in almost every corner of the globe. So (I) began to see the familiar words, ‘Let’s have a Coke,’ as more than an invitation to pause for refreshment. They were actually a subtle way of saying, ‘Let’s keep each other company for a little while.’ …So that was the basic idea: to see Coke not as it was originally designed to be — a liquid refresher — but as a tiny bit of commonality between all peoples…”
According to Bill Backer, the audience understood that Coca-Cola “could be a little social catalyst that can bring people together, talk things over, and sometimes communications get better if you’re just sitting over a bottle of Coke and looking people in the eye.”
Although I think the general advertising principles here are sound (people want to buy happiness), I don’t think this ad campaign would work today. It’s too overt. To me, this seems aimed at an optimistic and idealistic audience. The culture of the 2020s is more cynical and pessimistic. “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” would be received as a joke or a parody. You could send a message like this today through a more implied means. If you run an ad with people sitting around, drinking coke, and having fun, the same message is delivered but not out loud. Not saying it out loud is important.
We can sometimes draw well-educated hypotheses about demographics through advertising. Ads are the means through which people who want your money communicate to you. They know what appeals to their target audience. What does it say about Baby Boomers that they were still swayable by such overtly optimistic and idealistic messaging, even after the almost constant state of geopolitical and societal turmoil provided by the 1960s? I don’t know. It’s worth studying. Maybe the 1960s are precisely the reason for the success of an ad like this. Coke here isn’t just selling happiness and connection, it’s selling escapism. It seems almost naive and childish but it might be that an audience who grew up practicing drills wherein they hide under their desk at school, in the event of nuclear war, might have felt deprived of a childhood and that this deprivation may have had some psychological consequences. Imagine the type of damage that led to Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, but at scale.
What happens to a nation wherein a generation of people form a collective identity (“The Greatest Generation”) around the notion that they faced down the greatest threat ever to our species and won? Do they believe in the inevitable and indefatigable march of progress? What about their kids? What if in spite of those things, and great personal prosperity, the looming threat of the end of the world is constant and pervasive? How is your brain shaped when fed two opposite messages all the time?
Maybe that would lead you to standing on a hillside with your attractive friends singing about Coke.
♫It’s the real thing.♫
