The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink

by Michael Blanding

  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.

  Despite that bait-and-switch from a beautiful girl’s smile to a mouthful of sugary refreshment, Dobbs was hailed as head of a movement for “Truth in Advertising,” a crusade for “clean, truthful, honest publicity.” As president of the Associated Advertising Clubs of America, he distanced the drink from the frauds of patent-medicine makers, saying the company was “claiming nothing for Coca-Cola that it did not do, no virtue that it did not have.” And yet the company was pouring out astronomical sums to “truthfully” and “honestly” shape Coke’s image.

  By 1908, the company’s ad budget topped half a million dollars a year. That number grew to more than $750,000 in 1909, the same year the Associated Advertising Clubs of America lauded Coca-Cola as the “best
advertised article in America.” Four years later, in 1913, the company spent $1.4 million to churn out a mind-numbing take of logo-stamped junk, including 5 million lithographed metal signs, 2 million soda fountain trays, 1 million Japanese fans, 1 million calendars, 10 million matchbooks, 50 million paper “doilies,” 20 million blotters, and 25 million baseball scorecards—all in just one year.

  Given these efforts, it was a surprise in 1918 when Coke’s sales declined for the first time in the company’s history, dropping from 12 million to 10 million. The problem wasn’t in demand, but supply. As the United States prepared to enter World War I in 1917, and access to international supplies of sugar would be cut off, Dobbs and Harold Hirsch made frequent trips to Washington to argue against a quota. Their pleas fell on deaf ears, however, when the country’s Food Administrator, Herbert Hoover, limited syrup producers to half their former amounts. Publicly, Coke took the defeat in stride, describing in an advertisement called “Making a Soldier of Sugar” how it selflessly cut production rather than water down the beverage. As Coke historian Frederick Allen writes in his book Secret Formula, the episode would establish Coke’s way of handing setbacks: “Lobby furiously behind the scenes, give in gracefully when the cause is lost, and be sure to associate the product with the highest national interest.”

  At the same time, the company must have taken note of the success of other companies, such as Procter & Gamble, whose Ivory soap appeared in every soldier’s mess kit, boasting in its own ads how it offered “the very joy of living to Our Boys when they are relieved from the front lines for rest, recreation, clean clothes, and a bath.” What if, in addition to those other fine things, the Boys could be relieved with a Coke? The man who answered that question would transform Coke from a national beverage into an international phenomenon.

  After the lawsuits and sugar rationing, the post-World War I Coke finally got on a roll, much of that because of the leadership of a new boss: Robert Woodruff—known as “The Boss” for the fifty-some years he effectively ran the company. The son of that cranky banker Ernest Woodruff, Robert Woodruff stands like a giant over the twentieth-century history of Coke, leading the company on an epic quest for expansion.

  A lackluster student who was forever failing the test for his father’s affections, he dropped out of Emory after just two years to work as a manual laborer, and then salesman at a truck company, White Motor Works. As bad as he was as a student, Woodruff proved to be a born salesman, encouraging an easy liking from clients and a reflexive loyalty from subordinates. By 1922, he was first vice president of the White Motor Works and a member of the board. Watching from afar, Ernest Woodruff both resented and admired his son’s success. After canning Sam Dobbs, and knowing Howard Candler was not suited to be president forever, Ernest decided he’d rather see his son succeed him than succeed without him, and tapped him to be president of the Coca-Cola Company that year.

  Whatever the elder Woodruff’s motives, he made the right choice, at least as far as the company was concerned. By the 1920s, Coke had established itself as the national brand of soft drink, with a monopoly that few companies could ever hope for. As it became more and more a part of the landscape, lifestyle started imitating advertising: Films began incorporating the drink into scenes, music started spontaneously referring to it in lyrics.

  The 1920s was also the decade advertising came into its own. As Europe cleaned up the wreckage from World War I, a newly confident American marketing machine churned countless new products off the assembly lines. “The chief economic problem today,” wrote ad executive Stanley Resor at the time, “is no longer the production of goods but their distribution. The shadow of overproduction . . . is the chief menace of the present industrial system.” To sell all of the new radios, telephones, and refrigerators, advertising increasingly seemed a necessary part of the industrial process. A new generation of ads took the psychological techniques of “atmosphere advertising” and ran with them to exploit the unconscious needs of consumers, probing for consumers’ soft spots to promise the health, happiness, comfort, or love that a product would bring—or conjuring the anxieties of not owning a product, creating new afflictions such as “halitosis” and body odor, and then providing their solutions in Listerine and Lifebuoy soap.

  Coke retained its positive outlook—and why shouldn’t it? Coke was tailor-made for the Jazz Age, the first American generation of young people to rebel against their parents in a fast-moving culture of jitterbug and gin. As the Roaring Twenties roared in, D’Arcy’s Coca-Cola girls strutted their stuff in flapper dresses and bathing suits, always with a beading bottle or glass at the ready. A brief attempt to increase rural sales with homey images of farms and storefronts was a flop—sales pointed upward only when the ads featured the young and rich.

  Even so, Coke hadn’t even begun to saturate its potential market. Robert Woodruff immediately set out to increase the company’s profits and its share price with one word in mind—growth. If consumption of Coke increased just a few drinks per person per month, the company calculated, it would translate into millions in profits. The key to that, he reasoned, was making sure that people had access to a bottle of Coke whenever the urge to drink one struck them. It was Robert Woodruff’s sales chief Harrison Jones, a six-foot-two gregarious redhead, who first coined the phrase of putting Coke everywhere “within an arm’s reach of desire.” Woodruff liked the phrase and repeated it so much that he adopted it as his own.

  In order to further make that vision a reality, he enlisted a new ally with a gift for stoking that desire. Archie Lee started out as a newspaper reporter in North Carolina—but his ambition led him to advertising. “A man who can see life in its true colors and describe it in words can gain fortune and fame,” he wrote his parents in 1917. Joining the D’Arcy Agency, Lee worked hard to distinguish himself. Soon he was virtually writing the entire Coca-Cola campaign by himself.

  By the time Lee took over in the 1920s, Coke was taking advantage of new four-color printing techniques to run increasingly lavish advertisements painted by some of the best artists of the day—Hayden Hayden, Haddon Sundblom, N. C. Wyeth, and Norman Rockwell. Before Lee, the company had never been big on slogans. He not only started to introduce them, but also came up with some of the most memorable slogans of the twentieth century. Unlike the increasingly hard-sell and negative advertising of the day, Coke stood apart as a small pleasure as simple as it was inevitable. Beginning in 1923, Lee started rolling out a new slogan every few months, all of them intentionally restrained—“Enjoy Thirst,” “Always Delightful,” and “It Had to Be Good to Get Where It Is.”

  The biggest breakthrough, however, came on July 27, 1929, when Lee coined the simple slogan “The Pause That Refreshes.” The idea that Coke could be a momentary time-out captured the public imagination in the frenetic 1920s, when a booming economy and the new environment of fast-paced city life, motion pictures, and jazz were overwhelming the senses. Unlike Coke’s initial pitch to soothe jangled nerves a generation before, the slogan promised that relief could come not through a secret formula of medicinal herbs but just through the simple momentary pleasure of drinking a cold beverage in the midst of a busy day.

  Coke’s ad slogans might have used the soft sell, but behind the scenes, its selling tactics were anything but subtle. In his quest to put Coke “within an arm’s reach of desire,” Woodruff created a Statistical Department to analyze highway car traffic and supermarket foot traffic to determine the most effective placement for ads. The department’s research also identified a new market, home consumption, and created new cardboard “six-boxes” for housewives to take bottles home.

  Meanwhile, the legions of Coke Men unleashed upon retailers around the country were told not to accept no for an answer. “Salesmen should keep calling unremittingly on their prospects,” wrote sales chief Harrison Jones. “Continual chewing will enable you to digest your food.” Ad exec William D’Arcy repeated the mantra: “No matter how many times you have talked to a deale
r about Coca-Cola, there is always something new to say. Repetition convinces a man.” By 1928, Woodruff could boast, “We can count on our fingers the soda fountains that do not serve Coca-Cola.” Stock price increased along with sales, quadrupling from $40 to $160 in the decade since Ernest Woodruff’s syndicate first took over the company. As the bull market roared, the elder Woodruff made a fortune—$4 million—in Coke stock, while Robert stashed a cool million.

  But even when the market crashed, Coke continued to grow. In many ways, the Great Depression was Coke’s finest hour yet, Archie Lee’s “pause that refreshes” offering a temporary respite from the grinding headlines of job losses and bread lines. Buddy might not have been able to spare a dime, but he could always spend a nickel on a Coke. Coke pushed the point with new ads exhorting “Don’t Wear a Tired Thirsty Face” and “Bounce Back to Normal.”

  The Depression was a hard time for advertising, with a backlash against the lifestyle ads of the 1920s and a return to hard-sell ad copy. Coke barely blinked, churning out an even more scantily clad parade of bathing-suited Coca-Cola girls, and adding celebrity endorsements from Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and other Hollywood stars. As far as Coke’s ads were concerned, there was no Depression; a better life was only the pop of a bottle cap away. In 1933, Woodruff blithely announced the company was putting an extra $1 million into its ad budget; during the period, it was one of the top twenty-five advertisers in the country.

  Of all Coke’s ads, however, some of its most successful featured the opposite of Coke’s usual thin and beautiful people, showing instead a portly older gentleman with a white beard and furry red suit. Despite some claims, Coke didn’t create the image of Santa Claus we recognize today. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers and artists were gradually following the lead of Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in creating their picture of the gift-bestowing elf with “red garments . . . ruddy cheeks and nose, bushy eyebrows, and a jolly, paunchy effect,” as The New York Times wrote in 1927. But even though the Coca-Cola Company didn’t create the image, it did solidify St. Nick for generations of children when its ads of jolly Santa created by artist Haddon Sundblom became ubiquitous starting in the 1930s. More often than not, they featured a story line of children leaving a Coke in lieu of milk and cookies for Santa to pause and refresh himself on Christmas Eve, inspiring many children to adopt the practice as their own.