The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [18]
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