The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [46]
In some of the contracts, schools could even earn additional money by selling more Coke. An early report to hit the media was the strange affair of the “Coke Dude”—the self-chosen moniker of John Bushey, a superintendent in Colorado Springs. Bushey wrote his principals explaining the district had to top 70,000 cases annually or risk reductions in the payments from Coke, which ranged from $3,000 to $25,000 per school. He suggested they place machines in classroom corridors and allow kids to buy drinks throughout the day. Even if soda wasn’t allowed in class, he urged teachers to consider allowing juices, teas, and waters. Sadly, the district fell short, in part because of loopholes that counted only direct sales from vending machines, and not Coke sales at sporting events. “Quite honestly, they were smarter than us,” Bushey later told The New York Times.
Coke sweetened the pot for some educational honchos, paying the heads of the National Parent Teacher Association and the National School Boards Association $6,000 each in “consulting fees” to fly to Washington and Atlanta as part of a group called the Council for Corporate and School Partnerships. In a testimonial on the group’s website that was later removed, a Coca-Cola official raved about the quality of consulting the educators provided, claiming, “They have become our friends!”
Perhaps the person most responsible for the growth in pouring-rights contracts nationwide, however, was a former college athletic director from Colorado named Dan DeRose, who reinvented himself as DD Marketing, a consulting company to guide schools on striking the hardest bargain with soda companies. Between 1995 and 1999, DeRose inked $300 million in contracts (the consultant pocketing a healthy 25 to 35 percent of the total).4 “My basic philosophy,” he told The Denver Post in 1999: “Schools have it; they’re offering it. If we can assist them in maximizing their revenue then I think we’re doing a great, great service.” He even used his own daughter Anna to underscore the value of soda contracts, boasting to school administrators when his daughter was in first grade: “From now until she’s graduated, all she’ll drink is Coke. . . . She doesn’t even know how to spell Pepsi.”
As the contracts got more and more lucrative, however, some parents and activists began expressing misgivings about the amount of advertising by soda companies in schools. “There should never be a situation on public property where commercial advertising is permitted,” says Ross Getman, a self-described “obsessive-compulsive” from Syracuse, New York, who launched a website to track the contracts nationwide, starting with the one signed by Cicero-North Syracuse High School in 1998. That one included up-front payments from Coke of $900,000 to construct a new football stadium—in which the Coke logo would be prominently displayed on a six-foot-high scoreboard provided by the company, with athletes on the field required to drink out of red Coke cups.
The deal was inked with the help of the president of the state assembly, Michael Bragman, who had a home filled with antique Coca-Cola memorabilia that would set the collectors at the Gaylord Texan to drooling, including two fully stocked Coke machines in the basement. Over the years, Bragman had been a good friend to Coke, helping to repeal a 2-cent-per-container soda tax imposed back in the 1990s. In exchange, Coca-Cola had consistently been one of the biggest contributors to Bragman’s reelection campaigns.
Now, standing next to Bragman at the announcement, Coca-Cola Enterprises CEO