The Coke Machine (6 page)

Advertising was
literally created by America. Lurid English handbills in the 1600s urged country folks to witness oddities such as “a woman with three breasts,” but the first serious ads touted something only slightly less obscene: free land and limitless opportunity in the New World, compliments of the Virginia Company. After their birth, ads followed the colonists across the ocean, posting real estate for sale and rewards for the capture of runaway slaves, and, as prosperity trickled down, wine, wigs, and perfumes, all described in increasingly over-the-top, flowery language.

A man named Volney Palmer opened the first advertising agency in Philadelphia in 1843, serving as little more than a middleman buying up space in newspapers and selling it to manufacturers at a markup. At the time, most companies dismissed advertising as “puffing,” an ungentlemanly pursuit designed to unfairly trick the consumer—if not an admission that your product couldn’t succeed on its own merit.

The first industry to throw good taste aside was the same one that gave rise to the creation of Coca-Cola: patent medicines. With few intrinsic qualities to sell their products, patent medicines had long employed an extra sleight of hand to lodge their names in the minds of consumers. The theatrical “medicine shows,” however, reached audiences of only a few dozen people at a time. To maximize exposure, medicine makers blanketed streets with handbills and employed teams of young boys to hand out collectible trade cards.

In the countryside, they really went wild, painting every rock, fence-post, and barn with names of salves, elixirs, and potions. An English visitor in the 1870s lamented that travelers to the United States couldn’t “step a mile into the open country, whether into the fields or along the high roads, without meeting the disfigurement.” Niagara Falls, Yosemite, and Yellowstone Park were all covered in painted ads. One enterprising laxative maker even offered $25,000 to help build the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal in exchange for posting “Fletcher’s Castoria” in giant letters on it for a year (fortunately, the U.S. government turned him down). When, just before the Civil War, the number of newspapers exploded, patent medicine makers discovered a new way to reach the masses. It was a perfect match: Newspapers needed money, and patent medicine makers needed something on which to spend their obscene profits. By 1847, there were 11 million medicine ads in some two thousand papers nationwide. In some, they took up half the ad space. Oftentimes they consisted simply of the name of a tablet or salve repeated over pages and pages of dense text. But with increasing competition, the ones that succeeded were those that used the most creative or memorable slogans or artwork to sell their products.

As one medicine proprietor said, “I can advertise dish water, and sell it, just as well as an article of merit. . . . It’s all in the advertising.” Some early ads appealed to patriotism: “The Army protects our country against internal Dissension, Pe-Ru-Na protects our country against Catarrhal Diseases.” Others, like Hembold’s Extract of Buchu, peddled exotic ingredients, with pictures showing “Hottentots” gathering buchu leaves off the Cape of Good Hope. Then, of course, there was that old standby, T&A—with ads featuring a flash of cleavage or a half-robed girl entering or exiting a bath.

It was only a matter of time before other industries began to take a page from patent medicine makers to advertise their own products. “The greatest advertising men of my day were schooled in the medicine field,” said advertising pioneer Claude C. Hopkins in
My Life in Advertising
. “It weeded out the incompetents and gave scope and prestige to those who survived.” In many ways, advertising became a necessity for products sold nationally for the first time after the Civil War. In order to recoup packaging and shipping costs, companies such as Uneeda Biscuit, Quaker Oats, and Campbell’s Soup needed something to persuade customers to pay a premium over the generics in the cracker barrel or sugar loaf.

In part, the new packages themselves served as ads. Tobacco companies literally branded their icons into the leaves with a hot iron—creating the concept of a “brand” as something that didn’t involve cattle. But to keep up with the new demand for newspaper advertising, ad agencies transformed from mere middlemen to one-stop shops employing copywriters and artists to design ads for clients. Royal Baking Powder was the first company to picture its product in a newspaper advertisement in the 1870s. Quaker Oats did one better with the creation of its smiling behatted symbol, personally reassuring customers of the superior quality of its most pedestrian product. Manufacturers borrowed a toned-down version of the patent medicine maker’s repetitive sales pitch, developing cloying catchphrases to figuratively brand their names into the mind of the consumer—“Do Uneeda Biscuit?” or “Good morning! Have you used Pears’ Soap?”

 

 

 

The Coca-Cola Company
used a bit of all of these tactics—and perfected them. As Coke spread rapidly across the country, it was advertising, not the secret formula, that kept it on top. After all, as business historian Richard Tedlow comments, “How really different was this product from other colas in taste?” In the early days, he continues, it probably varied as much “from soda fountain to soda fountain as it differed from similar soft drink products.”

But the name remained the same, and from the beginning, Pemberton and his partners outdid other soft drink companies in getting it before the public. Their first year, they spent more than $70 on oilcloth banners and streetcar signs around Atlanta—despite reportedly earning less than $50 in sales. As profits increased, so did the advertising. Over the next few years, Coke’s Spencerian script graced the sides of buildings and barns, along with soda fountain trays, fans, bookmarks, and paperweights—the Victorian antecedents of the advertising accrual that would one day fill the Gaylord Texan Hotel. By 1890, the advertising budget had swollen to more than $11,000, nearly a quarter of total sales.

Coke’s slogans in those days hedged their bets, selling Coke as both a medicine to soothe jangled nerves and a cooling refreshment—a dichotomy encapsulated in Coke’s very first ad in
The Atlanta Journal
. “Coca-Cola. Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating! The New and Popular Soda Fountain Drink,” the ad crowed, before stressing the healthful qualities of coca leaves and kola nuts. As Candler took over, he kept up the split personality, touting the drink as refreshment and “nerve tonic” that both “satisfies the thirsty and helps the weary.”

Increasingly, those claims were made in a new genre—magazines. The first magazines, which helped to usher in the Progressive Age with their muckraking investigations of big business, were paradoxically supported in large part by the advertising revenue of a raft of new products. And unlike newspapers, they embraced the use of artwork to fill their pages. Ad agencies produced more and more elaborate illustrations, at the same time streamlining flowery language or simple phrases into more sophisticated copy.

Ad titan Alfred Lasker, one of many early admen to earn the moniker “father of advertising,” argued at the turn of the twentieth century that each ad should include a precise reason why customers should buy a product. Companies worked to create the next memorable catchphrase, from Procter & Gamble’s new soap—“It Floats”—to Kodak’s new instant camera—“You Press the Button—We Do the Rest.”

With the pressure to pick one characteristic, and one only, the Coca-Cola Company made a strategic shift away from its medicinal use to emphasize the appeal as a soft drink. As Frank Robinson later explained, “Instead of advertising to one man in a hundred [who was sick] . . . we advertised to the thousands, by advertising it as a refreshing beverage.” In truth, the switch had as much to do with the stubborn capitalist tendencies of Asa Candler. Looking for a source of income during war over Cuba in 1898, the U.S. government levied a tax on the fat patent medicine industry, including a total of $29,500 over three years on Coca-Cola. The amount was insufferable to Candler, who took the case to court in 1901—but not before almost totally dispensing with medicinal claims. (Coke eventually won the case when the government couldn’t substantiate the drink’s amount of cocaine, which by then had been almost entirely removed.)

The change in advertising was fortuitous for Coke, coinciding with the dawn of the Progressive Era, when journalists such as E. W. Kemble and especially Samuel Hopkins Adams began to increasingly attack patent medicines, blowing the cover off many of their fraudulent claims. Coke had already moved on, crafting an image based on relaxation and enjoyment. Working with Atlanta’s Massengale Advertising Agency, the company turned out a procession of smiling, fancily dressed Victorian women raising flared glasses of Coke to their lips. Coke certainly wasn’t the only company advertising with idealized upper-class images, but the sheer ubiquity of its ads set the tone for advertising nationally. Looking at them, you’d never know that the United States was going through convulsive demographic changes, with immigrants flooding the country, fueling a new manufacturing boom with long hours in the factory.

If those rigid images of upper-class refinement seemed an odd choice for a mass-market product such as Coke, contemporary economist Thorstein Veblen offers a reason for their success in his 1899 book
The Theory of the Leisure Class
, in which he invented the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe the consumer pretenses of the upper classes. The high-Victorian style of top hats and walking sticks had nothing to do with functionality, but were rather “evidence of leisure,” he wrote, a message sent to onlookers that a person wasn’t involved in “any employment that is directly and immediately of any human use.” By associating Coca-Cola with such refinement, Coke in effect created the first “aspirational” advertising campaign, sending the uniquely American message that success could be achieved simply by buying the right brand.

And in Coke’s case, the cost of admission to that “brand community” was remarkably low—a nickel, or a price that even the lowliest worker could afford. As Andy Warhol would later say: “The President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”

 

 

 

Whether Coke realized it
or not, it was on the vanguard of a new form of advertising. Just as Coke was establishing its new identity, Northwestern University psychologist Walter Dill Scott revolutionized the advertising field by applying the newly in-vogue principles of psychology. In his 1903 book
The Psychology of Advertising
, he argued that “the effect of modern advertising is not so much to convince as to suggest.” So-called reason-why advertising was a blunt instrument compared with “atmosphere advertising,” which would associate a product with the viewer’s subconscious desires: to be well liked, to be healthy, to possess, to succeed.

In fact, the history of advertising might be seen as a pendulum swinging constantly back and forth between the “hard sell” advertising that spelled out specific reasons why a consumer should use a particular product and “atmosphere” advertising that emphasized the
idea
behind a product. Dill’s principles were especially adopted by makers of luxury items such as cars and pianos, who increasingly crafted ads displaying how products would fit into their customers’ desired lifestyles. Despite being one of the cheapest products on the market, however, Coke branded itself as the ultimate lifestyle symbol.

Looking for a way to distinguish himself when he took over advertising from the older Frank Robinson, Sam Dobbs dumped Massengale in 1906 in favor of up-and-coming St. Louis adman William D’Arcy. In D’Arcy’s ads, the men and women shook off their top hats and petticoats to engage in golf, tennis, swimming—sports that were still out of reach of the vast majority of people in an industrializing society. The Coke bottles in the scenes, meanwhile, became a subtle part of the leisurely lifestyle, and sometimes weren’t even pictured at all. Instead a simple tagline promised that “Coca-Cola provides a refreshing relish to any form of exercise.” D’Arcy further created an aspirational lifestyle for Coke with celebrity endorsements—before Bill Cosby, Christina Aguilera, and “Mean Joe” Greene, there were actor Eddie Foy, opera star Lillian Nordica, and baseball legend Ty Cobb.

More than anything, however, D’Arcy pioneered Coke’s main selling point for the next hundred years—pretty girls. “Sex sells” may be the oldest cliché in advertising, but until the turn of the century, sex was used only in sleazy products—circuses, cigarettes, and, of course, patent medicines. With the improvement of photography and color printing in the 1890s, companies began using pictures of women to sell everything from bicycles to cameras. But no one picked up the trend like soft drink companies did.

Before Coke, Moxie and Excelsior Ginger Ale both began revealing thighs and cleavage in their ads, and White Rock introduced its half-naked nymph in 1893. Sex was a natural match for beverages promising mental and physical stimulation from sugar and caffeine. “Interestingly enough,” writes Tom Reichert in
The Erotic History of Advertising
, “reactions to sexual imagery provide a similar physiological response: dilated pupils, slight perspiration, and heartbeats that are ratcheted up a notch. Pairing the two, sex and beverages, served to provide a subtle link between the reactions to the image and the drinks’ effect on us.”

Let loose from their bodices, Coca-Cola girls became noticeably sexier. One 1910 ad flat-out said, “Nothing is so suggestive of Coca-Cola’s own pure deliciousness as the picture of a beautiful, sweet, wholesome, womanly woman.” Most ads, however, just implied as much, with foxy maidens offering a coquettish smile and a come-hither glint in the eye. Candler was adamant that there be no “hint of impurity” in his ad subjects—Coca-Cola girls would flirt but not put out. And yet they were arguably more effective for being ultimately unattainable.