Belching Out the Devil

by Mark Thomas

  The first reason is specific to me; the second is global. When George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest he said ‘Because it’s there.’ Why do I want to write about Coke? ‘Because it’s everywhere.’ You can’t escape it.

  And sitting here in Atlanta airport the impact of that statement was just beginning to hit me. The gulf between self-image and reality can be an ego-crushing chasm. I like to think I have a competent grasp of the basic concepts of globalisation, human rights and social movements, but realistically I know on a bad day I’m about as incisive and cutting as a Haribo.

  Like most big-heads I believe my abilities to be greater than they are, but even I have moments of clarity. This morning I visited the Coke museum which is a testimony to the Company’s history and its advertising blitzkriegs, and as I look around I realise I am witnessing a skirmish in one of those battles right now. In the immediate vicinity of my seat in the the airport lounge is a man-sized Coca-Cola fridge packed with Company products, an authentic Mexican diner serving drinks in Coke glasses, a massive Coca-Cola vending machine, a bottle of Coke sticking out of a seven-year-old’s rucksack, a 30-something in a Coca-Cola T-shirt and numerous bottles of Dasani, Coca-Cola’s brand of bottled water, being slurped by a school sports team that have arrived in tracksuits. Leaning back on the seat I can capture this entire scene within my field of vision. I am the odd one out, the exception to the Coke-drinking norm.

  Coca-Cola is the biggest brand in the world, they have a greater global reach than a flu virus, they have lawyers who excrete spare IQ points and I am a dad sitting in an airport holding a teddy bear and an asthma inhaler muttering, ‘Oh God, what have I done…’

  1

  THE HAPPINESS FACTORY

  Atlanta, USA

  ‘Coke is like a little bottle of sparkle-dust.’

  Inside the Happiness Factory, The Coca-Cola Company ‘documentary’

  Everyone tells stories and a good story is a sleight of hand, distracting where needs be and discerning in its revelations. But the craftiest storytellers can tell you a tale without you realising it’s being told. They are called advertisers - though some prefer the word ‘twat’. Every product they sell has a tale to tell and an audience in mind to tell it to. They can tell a story with a phrase, a picture and sometimes with a single pencil line. Without them transnationals would become extinct because in order to sell they have to tell stories. They have to tell them to survive. Without adverts, brands do not exist and without brands modern corporations crumble.

  No company spends money unless they feel it is for their financial benefit, so consider the estimated total global advertising budget for 2008: it is US$665 billion1, or to use its technical term a ‘gazillion’. With that amount of money you could run the UN and its entire operations for 33 years2. Or you could finance a totally new ‘War on Terror’3: the US could invade North Korea and Cuba and still have change for a fair crack at France. For lovers of traditional forms of statistical comparison, the global advertising budget is Liberia’s GDP for 600 years4.

  In the battle of the brands Coca-Cola are king. In 2007 news spread across the globe’s financial networks that for the sixth year in a row Coca-Cola had been ranked as the world’s top brand, beating well-known competition from Microsoft, McDonald’s, Disney, IBM and Nokia to the title5. Business Week/Interbrand annual ratings and its evaluations are based on a distinct criteria: the belief that brands can be intangible assets, ie, something that doesn’t physically exist yet can nonetheless have a financial worth. The value of a brand is calculated through surveys, which essentially measure the goodwill felt towards a company. Now I’m not an expert on high finance but the day that the trader or banker came up with the idea that you could put a price on…er…nothing tangible - well, that day must have ended very late at night with a taxi driver helping them to the front door.

  Interbrand valued the Coca-Cola brand at $65.324 billion, which is a lot of goodwill. And the company must fight for every penny of it. For take away the brand, the image, the red and white colours and iconic script, take away the shape of the bottle, the advertising, the polar bears, the lights in Times Square, the Santa ads at Christmas, the Superbowl commercials, the sponsorship of the Olympics and football leagues, take all that away and you are left with the product: brown fizzy sugar water. And brown fizzy sugar water with no packaging, no logo and no built-in aspirations concocted in advertising land is not something any of us really need. Asa Chandler, Coke’s first proprietor, knew this and set to conquering the world with a simple philosophy: advertise everywhere and make sure the drink is always available.

  But there is one crucial thing about storytelling, as any narrator knows: the details that are left out of a story are as important as those that are left in. I am about to be reminded of this as I head for the World of Coca-Cola, a smooth silver building, with metal curves and a gleaming tower, half-corporate HQ, half-Bond-villain lair. It is essentially the Coke museum, the repository of the official Coke story, but this corporate autobiography leaves out some of the more uncomfortable truths.

  The morning is cheerfully cold, a lovely Southern winter’s day in Atlanta; the sun makes not one bit of difference to the temperature but it shines bright across the clear blue sky. A few police officers stand around Pemberton Park in the city centre, coats zipped up and wearing hats with earmuffs that dangle down each side of their heads, gently reducing them from figures of authority to parodies of Elmer Fudd. They drink coffee, smile and nod as I wander past. This is the entrance to The World of Coca-Cola and somewhere discreet loudspeakers are playing Coke’s most memorable advertising jingle, ‘I’d like to buy the world a Coke’.6 Which may explain the earmuffs.

  I like to think the company plays this song as a hymn of thanks to the Atlanta Development Authority who gave them $5.4 million to help pay for the park landscaping and the entrance plaza,7 or the City Council who scrapped $1.5 million worth of sales tax for the company,8 or indeed the property tax worth $2 million that the Atlanta city fathers decided they didn’t want Coca-Cola to pay.9 Coke might be worth billions but they are not averse to sticking out their hand for loose change, especially when the loose change has six noughts at the end of it.

  In pride of place in the state-subsidised Pemberton Park stands a six-foot four-inch bronze statue of the area’s namesake, the founding father of Coca-Cola, pharmacist John Pemberton. Officially he created the drink in 1886 and sold it from Jacob’s pharmacy;10 now, over 120 years later, his noble image stands facing the park, one hand on a small Victorian table at his side. In his other hand he holds up a glass of Coca-Cola, partly in celebration, partly inspecting it, his impassive face considering his drink and offering it out to the world. It is the image of a pioneer, a scientist hero and benefactor to humanity. Sir Alexander Fleming wouldn’t have minded having a statue like this and he discovered penicillin. The statue portrays Pemberton as thinner than the photos I have seen of him, where he looks a tad chubby. This apparently is not the only factual discrepancy. According to Mark Pendergrast, one of the most respected authors on the company, John Pemberton returned from the American civil war addicted to morphine.11 So Coca-Cola’s founder was a chunkie junkie, though in fairness, who would erect a statue of a fat druggie outside a family tourist attraction - with the exception of the Elvis Presley estate?

  So for the greater good of the corporate image ol’ morphine Pemberton loses a few pounds and gets clean. And inside the historical revisionism continues; bizarrely there is no mention of one of the drink’s original ingredients, cocaine, which with hindsight is hardly the greatest sin, as there were other beverages of the late nineteenth century that contained varying quantities of Colombia’s most famous export. Admittedly it’s a slightly messy fact: one minute you want to teach the world to sing, the next you want to teach the world to talk really quickly and rub its gums with an index finger.

  It is these ‘messy facts’ that the Company seem to have an almost pathological desire
to try and hide. They are deviations in the Company narrative, grit in the PR grease. And Coca-Cola do not like grit in the grease.

  The World of Coca-Cola’s image control even extends to their choice of neighbours. Right next to it sits the Georgia Aquarium; in 2002 Coke gave nine acres for the aquarium. In 2006 Coke set aside two and a half acres for a civil rights museum - for an attraction that would celebrate Atlanta as the cradle of the movement, with plans to house some 7,000-odd pages of Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s writings. Thus corporate and civic history entwine together in one single downtown location, so we can remember the fight for human dignity and visit the fish.

  Coke’s new neighbours may or may not choose to display details of Dr King’s last-ever speech, made the day before he was killed. In it he called for African Americans to withdraw their economic support of companies if they ‘haven’t been fair in their hiring policies’, that is, favouring white workers over black workers. One of three companies that was targeted for boycotting that night was Coca-Cola. Dr King’s exact words were, ‘we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbours not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis’.12

  Likewise there may or may not be mention of the lawsuit bought against the company by hundreds of Coke employees, accusing them of discriminating against black workers in pay and promotion. The Company made no admission to these charges, but in November 2000 announced they were paying $192.5 million to settle the case.13 If you’re measuring racism by the buck, that’s a fuck of a lot of racism.

  Another little story the Company are not fond of is linked to the Olympics. Coca-Cola’s relationship with the Olympic Games began in 1928. But Coke downplays its sponsorship of the 1936 Games, the Berlin Olympics, where a certain psychopathic painter and decorator launched a PR drive to promote his Nazi state. The Coca-Cola Company are happy to mention that one of the US 1936 Olympic rowing team went on to become their chairman. They are also proud to point out that sprinter Jesse Owens advertised Coke - though this was years after he won four gold medals in Berlin, somewhat spiking the Aryan master-race theories of his host. The Company are keener to place themselves alongside those who are seen as ‘fighting’ the Nazis or promoting the ‘Olympic ideal’, rather than display themselves as a backers of the Olympic platform given to Hitler. And frankly, who wouldn’t be?

  But the Company have a few other Nazi items in the attic. Consider Max Keith, the managing director of Coca-Cola GmbH, Coke’s bottler in Germany, during World War Two. As the war progressed the supply of ingredients to make Coca-Cola dried up, so Max invented a new drink to quench the German thirst. He named it Fanta. Now there’s a strap line for an ad. Fanta: The Reich Stuff!

  Company historians note that Max Keith never joined the Nazi Party but he did exhibit Coca-Cola GmbH at a trade fair organised to embrace the concept of the German worker under the Fuhrer. In another instance Max Keith decorated his Coca Cola stand with Nazi flags. This has been confirmed by The Coca-Cola Company which said: ‘[Max] Keith at a bottler convention displayed swastikas and ended with a salute to Hitler. [This] would not have been out of place in the US if it were reversed and the podium had an American Flag and the proceedings began or ended with the Pledge of Allegiance.’14 I’ll leave you to be the judge of that.

  What I do know is that The Coca-Cola Company archives have pictures of the stand at the trade fair ‘that depict swastikas used as decor’15 under the Coca-Cola banner. It is merely a guess on my part that the archivist would rather burn in hell than release those photos for public viewing

  It’s fairly safe to say that these stories are not going to generate greater sales for Coca-Cola, with the exception of the odd Klan customer. None of these facts, whether it is Pemberton’s naughty needle, Fanta’s dodgy parentage or King’s condemnation, tell the story Coca-Cola want us to hear and it is the story they want to tell that sells their drink.

  To hear the Coca-Cola story, it is a $15 admission charge for adults, $9 for kids aged between three and twelve. But before you are tempted to visit the World of Coca-Cola ask yourself one question: what is on show here? They make fizzy drinks and advertise all over the world in order to sell them; all they have are bottles and adverts - they can’t make a museum out of that, can they? Yes, they can. That is exactly what the World of Coca-Cola is: Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola adverts and a giftshop selling Coca-Cola merchandise.

  The first gallery you come to is the misnamed ‘Loft’, situated on the ground floor. Essentially this is an open area in front of two display cases, with the capacity for about two hundred people standing. The room is wall-to-wall banners, bottles and posters, pictures of American footballers urging them - and therefore us - to ‘Play Refreshed’. Another has a boy holding up a six-pack of Coke in the old-fashioned design: ‘All Set at Our Home’ it reads. Coke clocks, bold and bright shine from high up on the loft rafters, next to art deco leaded-glass lampshades, with stained-glass pictures of the company script. A huge banner reads ‘Live on the Coke Side of Life’, though it is not as if there is any other option around here. Even the lighting has a red hue, and my retinas are beginning to ache slightly from over-exposure to the Coke colours: everywhere is red and white.

  The glass cabinets hold Coke memorabilia as if it were treasure from the time of the pharaohs: toy delivery trucks, Christmas decorations, a pair of promotional hip huggers from the Seventies and the jewellery Raquel Welch wore on a Coke modelling shoot.

  In front of the cabinets, a young woman dressed like a zookeeper in boots, long trousers and a red collared T-shirt, is addressing the crowd with a hand-held cordless mic. She’s probably a perfectly nice girl, but she has all the emotional intonation of a flight stewardess. She must have repeated this spiel countless times leaving her over-familiar with the lines and distant from any meaning they might have. But she musters all the gusto she can and launches into the company schtick one more time.

  Running through the lines like a chore best done quickly, she says, ‘You’ll be in this room for just a few minutes then the doors either side of me will open and you will be allowed into the,’ she pauses for theatrical effect before proclaiming, ‘Happiness Factory.’ The trouble is she loses interest before she finishes the phrase, so it sounds like ‘HAPPINESS Factory.’ She gulps down some more air before charging on in near-monotone ‘In the Happiness Factory is an approximately six-minute-long animated documentary based on our 2006 Superbowl commercial and it gives you a little glimpse of all the magic that goes into each and every,’ she pauses, ‘Coca-Cola.’

  I manage to hang on to a couple of facts that she reels out: there are four hundred brands and the logo of the white swoosh on the red background is called the Dynamic Ribbon. Then I hear that our time in the Loft is ‘just a prequel to the rest of your day here’. Frankly, I don’t know which is more alarming: the prospect of staying here for a whole day or the use of the word ‘prequel’ to describe waiting in a room. Next time you’re on hold at the end of a phone waiting for an operator to become available, just remind yourself you are not in a queue but experiencing a prequel.

  Carla, the woman with the mic, continues by drawing our attention to the fact that the lights have just dimmed, which is the signal that ‘our audio artefacts have cued up, which are basically eighty years’ worth of Coca-Cola jingles. Feel free to sing along to them if you know the words.’ I raise an eyebrow in concern as snippets of ads get blasted at us. The second eyebrow goes up as a mum in tracksuit bottoms starts mouthing ‘Can’t beat the feeling’, while she wanders past the Rachel Welch jewellery. People are joining in, a group of thirty-something men who told me they’re from Florida start on ‘Always Coca-Cola’. I just know that if they play ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing…’ the whole room will burst forth in harmony. Oh fuck, I’m in a cult - this is what the Hari Krishnas would be like if they took sugar in their chai.

  The doors to the cinema open and I move rather too quickly through them and into a large auditorium with raked seating. There about twenty-five
of us dotted around the empty space facing a big cinema screen, in front of which a tour guide called John stands grasping a microphone. ‘I’m here to welcome you to Happiness Factory and living on the Coke side of life, and having fun is what it’s all about,’ he says, adding ‘Now I understand we have a birthday in the house’, at which one of the Florida thirty-pluses delivers a half-hearted cheer. ‘So let’s all sing happy birthday after three. One. Two. Three. Happy Birthday to you…’

  The audience, such as we are, mumble through Happy Birthday, while John throws himself into his mirthless task. If by bizarre chance anyone were ever to ask me, ‘What do you think it would be like to be taken hostage by Ronald McDonald?’