Editor’s Note: Earlier this year,
Advertising
slogans are a part of everyday life for consumers around the world, and
Coca-Cola has produced some great ones throughout our nearly 130-year history.
Our very first ad was published in the Atlanta Journal newspaper on May 29, 1886, a few short weeks after the drink was first served in Jacobs’ Pharmacy. The ad featured one of our longest-running slogans: “Delicious and Refreshing.” Those two words appeared on almost every ad or piece of merchandise (trays, clocks, etc.) until 1920.

In the
mid-1890s, The
While these
wordy slogans were in line with the advertising of the day, the company’s
president, Asa Candler, and head of advertising, Samuel Candler Dobbs, spotted
the trend toward national magazine advertising with the standardisation of
four-colour printing, which rendered more visually dynamic ads than their
black-and-white predecessors.
To produce
this enhanced advertising, Candler and Dobbs hired the D’Arcy agency from St.
Louis. D’Arcy was significant in helping to create a brand identity for
Coca-Cola. W.C. D’Arcy was associated with
Together with his creative director, Archie Lee, he crafted some of the greatest slogans in advertising history. While “Delicious and Refreshing” was part of the plan D’Arcy’s first big change was to add an arrow to all the advertising and packaging while adding the slogan, “Whenever You See an Arrow, Think of Coca-Cola.”

In 1907 they added the slogans “Good to the
Last Drop,” (yes, we beat Maxwell House with this one) to the advertising. The
team hit their stride by the 1920s when they created the “Thirst Knows No Season”
(1922) and our longest-running tagline, “The Pause That Refreshes” (1929). That
campaign was used in one form or another for almost three decades.
Advertising
began to change after World War II, when music and sung jingles played an
increasingly important role in campaigns. Slogans became shorter to fit into a
catchy melody.
By 1955,
Coca-Cola began to look for another agency who specialised in the modern radio
and television advertising. In 1956, McCann Erickson was named the lead
worldwide advertising agency for

In 1963, Bill
Backer, creative director for McCann, penned the jingle “Things Go Better with
Coke,” and had the Limeliters record a demo in a run-down apartment on 57th
Street in New York City. Backer had to
splice together several tapes, and you could still hear several flaws in the
recording. The company loved it and used that demo for the next six years!
Backer also developed the slogan, “It’s the Real Thing,” for which he and his
team wrote “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” in 1971.
By 1993, with
the constant evolution of advertising, The

Animated ads
have always been a staple of
Slogans, by
their very nature, are supposed to be “mindstickers” or “earworms.” The purpose
of advertising is to make people associate a slogan with a brand.
Ted Ryan is director of Heritage
Communications at The
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