The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [20]
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,