The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [16]
Despite their earnest appeals, it’s hard to imagine collectors holding a similar convention for any of dozens of brands surviving from the same era—Campbell’s Soup, Morton’s Salt, Kleenex Tissue. Coke, however, is something more, having long ago transcended its corporeal reality to become a stand-in for baseball games and soda fountains, national pride and international harmony—symbols worthy of devotion, even obsession. In another room down the hall, two brothers from Oklahoma have stacked crate upon crate of commemorative Coke bottles; they have some 40,000 in all. On the last day, participants sit through a live auction of Coke coolers, vending machines, billboards, a bicycle. As the rapid-fire patter echoes off the ceiling of the cavernous convention hall, cardboard signs fetch $1,000 and an 1899 calendar garners a high bid of $6,500.
Despite the free-flowing Coke in the back of the convention hall, the participants invariably get shy when asked about their love of the drink itself. “I drink way too much,” says Bessenden bashfully, patting his not-particularly-large stomach. “I limit myself to one can a day at work. Then I have one when I get home—a couple of cans.” He hesitates. “Sometimes breakfast . . .” Vaughn drinks a six-pack of Diet Coke daily. “I start with decaf coffee in the morning and then switch—too much caffeine is not good for your bones,” she says.
But of course, the appeal of Coke to the collectors has little to do with the drink itself. “In its simplest form, Coca-Cola is sugar water,” says Keith Duggan, perhaps the most fanatical Coke collector of them all, having attended every one of the club’s thirty-four past annual conventions. “But they don’t sell sugar water. They sell refreshment. They sell love. They sell good times.” As he says this, he is rummaging through crates of old ads in another hotel room, looking for one he might not already have.
Sitting in a rocking chair nearby, the club’s past president Dick McChesney concurs. More than any company of its time, he says, Coke invested in new techniques of graphic design and color. “Their philosophy was that you had to create an idea in their heads to get them to drink your soft drink,” he says, leaning back in a rocking chair. “As a collector, what could be better than a whole bunch of signs that create ideas?” He motions to a poster-sized reproduction of a 1942 ad with two girls in a convertible, one tipping a bottle to her lips. “How could you not look at that and say, ‘That makes me feel good to see those two gals enjoying a Coke’?”
He’s right, of course. The Coca-Cola Company would never have succeeded without its advertising. And in the bargain, it helped change advertising itself, into something that sold customers less on products than on the ideas.
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.
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