Thread by @unclebernbach

How a delayed flight helped inspire one of the most popular advertising campaigns ever. A thread.

1) In 1971, Bill Backer was a Creative Director at McCann-Erickson working on the Coca-Cola account. He was on route to London to meet with the account’s music director Billy Davis. The two were to come up with a jingle for a Coke radio ad.

2) Backer got stranded in Shannon, Ireland, after his plane was forced to land due to a blanket of fog over London.

3) Hotel rooms were scarce, so the passengers had to sleep at the airport. Many were upset and frustrated, including Backer, which led to a few raised voices.

4) In the morning, Bill saw some of the most vocal passengers from the night before laughing and sharing stories with their new friends over bottles of Cokes at the airport Café.

5) He saw the bottle of Coke as a small moment of pleasure that allowed people to share happiness. Motivated by the scene, he picked up a napkin and wrote the line: “I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company".

6) “So I began to see the familiar words, ‘Let’s have a Coke,’ as more than an invitation to pause for refreshment. They were actually a subtle way of saying, ‘Let’s keep each other company for a little while.’ recounted Backer

7) That was the idea for the campaign: to see Coke not as it was originally designed to be — a liquid refresher — but as a bit of commonality between people.

8) Bill Backer asked his team to adapt the jingle being written to a TV ad. Harvey Gabor, art director at McCann Erickson, proposed that the song represented a ‘united world chorus’ and that it should be filmed with a large group of young people on a cliff.

9) Backer & Gabor presented the storyboards to Coca-Cola Advertising Manager Ike Herbert, who approved a $100,000 budget to shoot the ad – an expensive price tag for an ad back in the 1970s.

10) The initial plan was to film on the Cliffs of Dover in England, but Mother Nature wasn’t cooperating. “We show up and the wind is blowing 65 to 70 miles an hour, and we were told it would continue for the next four days,” Gabor recalls.

11) The crew relocated to Rome and had to recast the actors. After more rain delays and countless other problems, they completed the climactic helicopter shot.

12) But when they entered the screening room that night, they realized they didn’t have enough to finish the spot. Also, the production company had left town for another project.

13) “We had no money, no footage and no production company,” Gabor said. Mercifully, the account supervisor at McCann Erickson agreed to draw from another budget to re-shoot in Rome.

14) The final budget would eventually top $250,000, making it the world’s most expensive commercial at the time.

15) The weather cooperated on the day of the rescheduled shoot, and the crew breathed a sigh of relief and wrapped production. Gabor returned to New York to screen the film for Backer, who was notoriously hard to impress.

16) “I look back and he’s crying,” Gabor said of his boss. “He said, ‘If the world only remembers me for this commercial, I’ll have lived a pretty good life.’”

17) "Hilltop” and the “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” were both immediate hits. Coca-Cola received more than 100,000 letters praising the ad, and radio stations across the country were flooded with requests for the song.

18) At a time when conflict and cynicism was dominating headlines, “Hilltop” became a rallying message of tolerance and hope, and is widely considered to be one of the most iconic ads ever created.

19) Here’s the remastered and final version of 'Hilltop':

20) In the mid-1970s, another version of the commercial was filmed for the holiday season. This reworking featured the same song, but showed the group at night, with each person holding a lit white candle.

21) In 1990, a follow-up to this ad, called “Hilltop Reunion”, aired during Super Bowl XXIV. It featured the original singers (now adults) and their children, and culminated in a medley of this song and the then-current “Can’t Beat the Real Thing” jingle.

22) This is an interview with Bill Backer, the campaign's Creative Director, about the impact of the advert.

23) Here are some of the sources of this thread:
washingtonpost.com/news/morning-m…
coca-colacompany.com/news/origins-o…
vsquared.com.mt/a-look-back-at…
amazingangelad.com/blog/real-don-…
thisisnotadvertising.wordpress.com/tag/bill-backe…
nytimes.com/2016/05/17/bus…

24) Finally, let’s not forget the role this ad played in what I hope is everyone’s favorite show here.