The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [27]
Eventually, the practice paved the way for a new “creative revolution” in the 1960s, a backlash against the overly utilitarian USP that would forever put the idea of the product above the product itself. “The greater the similarity between products, the less part reason really plays in brand selection,” noted the revolution’s chief architect, David Ogilvy. “There really isn’t any significant difference between the various brands of whiskey or the various cigarettes or the various brands of beer.” (He might have included soft drinks.) As a result, argued Ogilvy, it was the advertiser’s job to create an emotional response that consumers would unconsciously associate with a brand—the kind of advertising at which Coke had excelled for nearly a century.
In 1957, journalist Vance Packard exposed the “depth boys” in his best-selling book The Hidden Persuaders. The public outcry that followed, however, focused on a short section of the book about subliminal advertising—a part that directly implicated Coke. At the time, a researcher named James Vicary flashed the words “Hungry? Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola” for up to a three-hundredth of a second every five seconds during a showing of the movie Picnic in a New Jersey movie theater. According to Vicary, popcorn sales increased 57 percent and Coke sales 18 percent. Vicary later backtracked, all but admitting he made the whole thing up. Advertisers further denounced the practice, and the furor subsided. (Modern research has since debunked the technique.)
But the public missed the larger point of Packard’s book: All advertising is on some level subliminal—utilizing only dimly conscious parts of our brains to get us to irrationally open up our wallets. As New York Times columnist Rob Walker points out, “You’d have to be an idiot not to recognize that you’re being pitched to when watching a thirty-second commercial. But recognition is not the same as immunity.” In fact, “it’s precisely because we don’t tend to think of regular advertising as something we have to be on guard against, or even take seriously, that it works on us in much the way we imagine subliminal advertising might.”
After the challenge from Pepsi, Coke redoubled its efforts to associate Coke subliminally with almost everything. Of all of the agencies on Madison Avenue, none embraced the new “depth” techniques more than Coke’s ad house McCann. According to the firm’s research, when people thought of Coke, they thought not so much of the beverage itself as of the social interactions it helped facilitate—from the hostess serving Coke at dinner to the dads popping caps at Little League games. McCann copywriter Bill Backer used the insight to create the first successful Coke slogan in years: “Things Go Better with Coke.” What went better didn’t matter so much—Coke could just as well spark romance as childhood friendship. It was left to the consumer to fill in the blank.
That same year, Pepsi unveiled its “Pepsi Generation” ad campaign that challenged baby boomers to rebel against the conformity of their parents. Finally, both companies had an advertising style—and neither said a word about what the soda actually tasted like or contained. Despite the competition, the real winner was the soft drink market. Between 1954 and 1964, per capita consumption rose nearly 25 percent, from 174 servings per capita in 1954 to 227 in 1964. Along with the advertising face-lift, Coke also had a new face of the company. As the 1960s dawned, new president J.