Coke’s customary lobbyists shifted into high gear. Ben Oehlert brought a personal plea from President Johnson to Mostafa Kamel, the United Arab Republic’s ambassador to the United States. His Excellency Kamel was terribly sympathetic, writing that “nothing is closer to my heart than participating through my modest efforts in promoting cooperation between our two countries,” but he was powerless on “this delicate issue.” Feinberg, he suggested, should proceed as slowly as possible to gain time. Meanwhile, Alexander Makinsky rushed around the Middle East taking stock of the grim situation. Egypt, whose lead other Arab countries would follow, was looking for an excuse to jettison Coke anyway, since it needed to save on foreign exchange. Makinsky hoped that his friend Angel Sagaz, the Spanish ambassador to Cairo, who had once served as the Coke lobbyist’s intermediary with Franco, could help. Since the Spanish were firm friends of the Arabs and refused to do business with Israel, perhaps Sagaz could intercede for the soft drink in Cairo.
Coke’s only real hope, Makinsky believed, lay in immediate negotiations to construct a concentrate plant in Egypt, which would result in most of the capital remaining in the country. The Egyptians, he pointed out, were realists; money spoke louder than anti-Semitism. Makinsky also stressed that all of the bottling plants were owned by Arabs and that the boycott would put some twenty-five thousand natives out of work. In addition, Coca-Cola men emphasized that they were not investing one cent inside Israel—like Hilton Hotels and other international companies that had franchises in Israel without actually owning the business there themselves.
Nothing worked. Coca-Cola fell victim to its own symbolism as the typical American product, and the Arab demagogues whipped up such an emotional climate that the soft drink company could find no middle road. Refusing to renege on the promise to Feinberg, Coca-Cola watched helplessly as the Arab boycott against the product finally commenced in August of 1968. Coca-Cola men like John Brinton, who watched the Middle Eastern business collapse after nearly twenty years of hard work, insisted that it was ultimately a business rather than a moral decision: “They would have lost a lot more if they hadn’t given the franchise to Israel because of the Jewish boycott in the United States.”
UNRAVELING AT HOME
By the time the Arab boycott officially went into effect late in 1968, America itself was coming unglued, primarily because of protests over the escalating conflict in Vietnam. Regarding the civil strife in Vietnam as a fight to the death with Communism, Lyndon Johnson was determined to win at any cost. As the war heated up, Coca-Cola men first saw it as one more patriotic opportunity to sell soft drinks to GIs, as with World War II and Korea. They sent Anita Bryant to Southeast Asia to sing for the boys in 1965, tagging a photo with the caption, “Our Anita Cheers Troops With Bob Hope.” The same year, the Company built bottling plants in Danang and Qui-Nhon to supplement the overworked Saigon operation. As American troops poured into Vietnam, where returnable bottles presented quite a problem, the Company also shipped over nearly four hundred thousand cartons of canned Coca-Cola. In the John Wayne movie The Green Berets, an entire pallet of Coca-Cola parachuted to thirsty jungle troops.
Writer Tom Wolfe suggested that, rather than saturation bombing, the United States should “seduce its way to victory” by showering North Vietnam with Coca-Cola. A Japanese philosopher urged the same tactic for a different reason. “That will destroy them faster than bombs,” he said. The war in Vietnam starkly contrasted with World War II, however, and the Company soon realized it. While wartime advertising in the forties highlighted Coca-Cola’s vital presence in the foxholes, no ads proclaimed that things went better with Coke in Vietnam. James Farley, the aging Coca-Cola cold warrior, couldn’t understand the escalating antiwar protests, offering his “unhesitating support” to the president. Similarly, Robert Woodruff wrote to LBJ that the “American people are supporting your position. I am with you.”
Johnson’s earnest appeals to “my fellow Americans” fell on increasingly deaf ears, however, as television ushered bloody jungle scenes into American living rooms. The Tet Offensive early in 1968 nailed the final peg in the coffin of a presidency devoted to unifying America, eliminating poverty, and promoting peace throughout the world. Instead, Johnson faced race riots, burning inner cities, massive antiwar demonstrations, and a growing counterculture that rejected all the American virtues of hard work, cleanliness, respect for authority, and restraint. By the end of March, Johnson was completely demoralized and announced that he would not run for another term.
The dismal year of 1968 also heralded personal tragedy for Robert Woodruff. In January, his wife, Nell, suffered a stroke at Ichauway and died soon after. Though Woodruff was often away from his wife, she had provided his emotional anchor. At the age of seventy-eight, with the America he had known in shambles, Woodruff, always a heavy drinker, now increasingly turned to alcohol rather than Coca-Cola. When news of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination reached the White House, President Johnson and Robert Woodruff were there together, drinking away their mutual sorrows. Aware that the country, and particularly the South, could explode with racial violence, the Boss called Atlanta’s mayor Ivan Allen. “Ivan,” he said, “the minute they bring King’s body back tomorrow—between then and the time of the funeral—Atlanta, Georgia, is going to be the center of the universe. I want you to do whatever is right and necessary, and whatever the city can’t pay for will be taken care of. Do you understand what I’m saying?” The mayor understood that he could dip into the deep pockets of Woodruff and Coca-Cola, and he promptly dispatched the Windship, Coca-Cola’s Lear jet, to bring Coretta Scott King back to Atlanta. As African Americans rioted in over a hundred American cities, Atlanta avoided major bloodshed, thanks largely to the collaboration of Allen and Woodruff.*
Richard Nixon, resuscitated and scripted by Pepsi men and their ad agency, BBDO, won the presidency at year’s end, after a campaign appealing to the “silent majority” of Americans who recoiled in horror from the discord tearing the country apart. Nixon’s election, however, only signaled more trouble ahead for a deeply divided country. Coca-Cola’s vintage advertising appeared more and more out of synch with the times. In an attempt to stay hip and cool, the company hired Bruce Brown, creator of the film Endless Summer, to narrate a 1968 “Things Go Better” commercial in which California surfers swigged Coke. “Someone’s always makin’ waves in this world,” Brown philosophized on the voice-over. “Maybe that’s why Coca-Cola is the world’s most popular drink.” The implication of this non sequitur was that people who “made waves” drank Coke, but the young people who were shaking up America had advanced beyond the Beach Boy mentality. Johnny the Dork of the fifties Coke commercial had grown into Johnny the Hippie.
By 1968, in other words, things weren’t going better anywhere in America, and the six-year-old campaign was showing its age. In an attempt at relevance, the Company ran an ad that was an elaborate takeoff on the Statue of Liberty inscription. “America,” it read, “give me your hot, your thirsty, your weary, . . . your sons, your daughters, your surfers, your skiers, your football players, . . . your sun worshipers, your moon worshipers, your potato chip nuts, your pretzel eaters, . . . your vacuum cleaner salesmen, your ushers, your hippies, your high school students yearning to pass math. Things go better with Coke.” The message, of course, was that Coca-Cola stood for America and appealed to everyone, but the Coke ad seemed flat, forced, and unbelievable.
Looking toward the seventies, Coke men searched desperately for a new unifying theme. Again, lyricist Bill Backer came through with the perfect vehicle. McCann’s psychological researchers reported that young people despised hypocrites and phonies and valued genuine, spontaneous feelings. With these findings, Backer resurrected an old 1942 slogan and created “The Real Thing” campaign. Coca-Cola was “real,” not phony. It was part of the authentic, natural goodness that the counterculture was seeking. At the same time, the phrase was a subtle dig at Pepsi, which by implication was a fraud. The new slogan
echoed the hippies’ catch-all invocation to “do your own thing.” Sure, the song implied—but do it with the Real Thing in hand.
The visuals to accompany the sincere new lyric utilized still documentary style photography, with the movie camera performing the action by zooming and tilting to highlight each shot. One of the first “Real Thing” television commercials, launched in October of 1969, opened in Manhattan with a group of white and black teenagers playing basketball—the first real integrated Coke TV spot. It then traveled across America showing peaceful dirt roads, farms with windmills, log cabins, pretty young women, the American flag, and a California beach scene. The ad implied that this was the real America, not the violence and dissonance seen on the evening news.
Coca-Cola had miraculously implemented a slogan and campaign that appealed to both hawk and dove, National Guard and hippie, parent and child. While the commercials were innovative, however, they remained firmly grounded in the Coca-Cola tradition. Although the ads were oriented to lifestyle and emotional issues, the drink itself remained the star of the show. Somewhat illogically, Paul Austin observed that the new ads would “reflect Coke’s awareness of minority and other social sensitivities by stressing the product rather than people.”
Pepsi changed campaigns the same year, returning to the social implications of the earlier Pepsi Generation. “You’ve got a lot to live,” the jingle asserted, “and Pepsi’s got a lot to give.” The emphasis was on people, however, not Pepsi. Unlike Coke’s tranquil, almost elegiac commercials, the Pepsi efforts showcased strenuous group activity. These young cola drinkers were “coming at you, growing strong,” bursting with energy and good times. As Coca-Cola men smugly noted, Pepsi people had to try harder in an effort to catch the leader.
As Coke’s “Real Thing” commercials flooded the airwaves late in 1969, the Company performed a simultaneous face-lift. Coca-Cola men concluded that the Company had done its work too well with its ubiquitous signs. Ike Herbert, Coke’s new advertising chief, enjoyed pointing toward downtown Atlanta from his office window. “There are eleven signs down there,” he said, “but most people can find only two or three, and they know what they are looking for.” The innumerable Coke signs had vanished into the landscape. Particularly concerned about the battered old red disks and multi-colored signs in the nation’s urban ghettos and rural outbacks, the Company hired a New York firm, Lippincott & Margulies, to design a “mod” look for Coke. Code-named Project Arden as a reference to the famed cosmetic line, the assignment, as a Company memo put it, was to “take Coca-Cola, shorten her skirt, lift her face, give her a new hairdo, a whole ‘now’ style and catapult her back into the awareness of the consumer.” The resulting square sign sported a white “Dynamic Ribbon”—echoing the hobbleskirt bottle contour—running under the traditional script logo. At the same time, the simple phrase “Drink Coca-Cola” was altered to “Enjoy Coca-Cola”—a more fitting command from the image-conscious Company.
In a burst of self-important pizzazz, the Company introduced the new look and the “Real Thing” campaign simultaneously at its national bottlers convention in October of 1969 with a sound-and-light show that was the biggest thing to hit Atlanta since Gone with the Wind premiered there in 1939. Some journalists weren’t impressed with the hype, comparing it to “a flourish of trumpets and a roll of drums—followed by two Coke bottles clinking weakly together.”
The new look and campaign were, however, more than window dressing: the Company really had changed, and many longtime employees didn’t like it. In 1965, when the brand manager system commenced, different groups were scattered around Atlanta in satellite locations, pending the completion of a new eleven-story complex on North Avenue. During the remainder of the decade, the separate departments swelled, often duplicating functions. “Whenever you needed something done,” Charlie Bottoms recalled, “you just created a new position.” Within a few years, a staff below 500 mushroomed to 1,500 people. When the Company moved into its new quarters in 1969, secretary Mary Gresham found her surroundings drab and depressing as she sat behind her coffin-like black desk in the hall, staring at the modern wallpaper which, she thought, resembled aluminum foil. The thirty-five-cent lunch served by waiters had ceased. Instead, employees filed through a cafeteria to buy blander, more expensive food. “For so many years,” Gresham lamented, “it had been like living in a small town where everyone knew everyone else and their business. That closeness just wasn’t there anymore.”
POTENT NUTRITION AND THE GREAT CYCLAMATE SCARE
With a new decade only two months away, Paul Austin had navigated Coca-Cola through the turbulent sixties in remarkably good shape. The stock had split two-forone twice, in 1965 and 1968. In 1969, gross sales for the Company topped $1.3 billion, with its $121 million profit more than double that of Pepsi. True, Coke was spending nearly that amount with its $100 million annual advertising campaign, but thinner profit margins were simply a fact of life in a competitive market. Coca-Cola was now sold in 135 countries, and the overseas opportunities appeared limitless.
Nonetheless, the Company could hardly rest easy with its new campaign and logo, particularly in its home market, which still produced 50 percent of its sales volume. The Vietnam War had artificially stimulated the U.S. economy, now tottering from accumulated debt. Meanwhile, the protesters were shifting their attention from the war to pollution, poverty, malnutrition, racism, sexism, poor education, and chemical additives. Sensitive to increasing criticism about Coca-Cola’s lack of vitamins or nutritional value, Paul Austin authorized the development of Saci (pronounced “SAH-see”), a protein-rich soft drink—equivalent to a glass of milk—that would also taste good. The previous year, test marketing had begun in Brazil, but kids apparently didn’t like the taste.* In 1969, Ralph Nader, fresh from his victory over General Motors, attacked Coca-Cola in a hearing before the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. “While The Coca-Cola Company is distributing a high protein chocolate drink . . . to developing countries,” the crusader complained, “it supplies the United States with cola—a massive affliction that someday may be characterized as a disease.”
On short notice, Austin rushed to testify before the committee, exercising damage control. “The Coca-Cola Company is keenly mindful of its responsibility as a member of society wherever it does business,” he informed the senators. Nonetheless, it couldn’t just give away the new drink but must create a sound business venture, making Saci “equally attractive to the consumer and producer.” Austin promised that the Company intended to market Saci to America’s undernourished children as soon as the kinks were finessed. The Coca-Cola executive admitted that “we are twisting and turning” and that the taste had been modified twice and was still unsatisfactory. One senator who had brought two Saci bottles home to his Coke-loving children told Austin they hated the protein drink. “I thank you for your candor,” Austin replied between gritted teeth.
The beleaguered Coke executive would find plenty of reasons to grind his molars in the years to come. Only a week after the flashy bottlers’ convention unveiling the Real Thing and the Dynamic Ribbon, the Food and Drug Administration sounded another theme of the approaching seventies by revealing alarming test results on cyclamates, the sweetener in most diet drinks. The experiments, funded in part by the sugar industry, showed that laboratory rats on a cyclamate diet developed malignant bladder tumors. The FDA had no choice but to remove the chemical from the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) list and to ban it under the 1958 Delaney Amendment.
It didn’t matter that the rats had ingested fifty times the amount a human was likely to absorb. Coke’s Fred Dickson pointed out that an adult would have to drink 550 Frescas a day for the equivalent dosage. “You’d drown before you’d get cancer,” he told a reporter. Another soft drink executive noted bitterly that “under that law, you can ban sunshine.” With sensational coverage in all the media, however, the country panicked. Cyclamates, virtually unheard of the week before, were suddenly the equival
ent to poison. Even before the drinks were banned, The Coca-Cola Company started pulling TaB and Fresca from the shelves.
The Company quickly produced alternative versions of the drinks, converting Fresca completely to saccharin, while adding sugar to TaB’s saccharin. Trying to mask the new calories, the Company obtained FDA approval to advertise TaB as “six calories per fluid ounce” rather than revealing the total amount per drink as it had before. Coke men worked feverishly around the clock on new formulae and labels. The cyclamate ban didn’t hurt the Company too much domestically (a mere $2.5 million loss in the fourth quarter of 1969), since its diet drinks accounted for only 10 percent of sales. Royal Crown, whose Diet Rite dominated the market, was badly shaken. Oddly enough, Coca-Cola experienced its worst problems in Japan, where the Company didn’t even market drinks with cyclamates. Rumors spread that Coca-Cola itself contained the alarming sweetener, and Japanese consumers, even more finicky and quick to panic than their American counterparts, stopped buying the American soft drink. It took a determined public relations campaign to build sales volume again.
Another American problem spilled overseas to South Africa, where Coca-Cola’s thirty-seven bottling plants dominated the soft drink industry. Because of America’s heightened racial awareness, in 1968 Congress passed sanctions on the apartheid regime for the first time—a particular blow to Paul Austin, who had managed the South African business in the fifties. The newly imposed restrictions would “force us to milk our European business,” Austin complained.
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 45