He wanted to buy the world a Coke
Legendary ad executive wrote unforgettable slogans (and inspired Don Draper)
Bill Backer, a lapsed lyricist whose classic 1971 commercial taught a fractious world of potential Coca-Cola consumers to sing in perfect harmony and was featured in the finale of Mad Men, died May13 in Warrenton, Va. He was 89.
Backer and his team immortalized jingles and slogans that proclaimed “Things go better with Coke” and defined the soft drink as “the real thing”; declared that Miller Lite was “everything you ever wanted in a beer . . . and less”; elevated the Campbell’s brand by asserting that “soup is good food”; and allowed that “little girls have pretty curls, but I like Oreo.”
He also anointed the break devoted to beer drinking as “Miller Time,” reserved festive occasions for Lowenbrau (“Here’s to good friends, tonight is kind of special”), and created advertising campaigns for Fisher-Price, Hyundai cars, Parliament cigarettes, Philip Morris, Quaker Foods and Xerox.
But Backer had no illusions about what collaboration he would be remembered for, as he told the New York Times in 1993 when he was about to retire as vice-chairman and worldwide creative director of Backer Spielvogel Bates after a four-decade career in advertising.
“Nobody out there has heard of J. Walter Thompson or Backer Spielvogel Bates,” he said. “Those are temporal, self-aggrandizing entities. But if you come up with what’s basically a little hymn to getting the world together, it’s a contribution.”
His little hymn, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony),” became a memorable commercial for Coca-Cola, a hit record, the inspiration for a sequel Super Bowl advertisement in 1991 and a coda for Mad Men last year, when Don Draper, the series’ protagonist, meditating at a spiritual retreat in California, conjured up the original 1971utopian vision of apple trees and honeybees and snow white turtledoves, which prompted a youthful multicultural chorus on an Italian hilltop to want “to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.”
Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, was quoted as describing the series finale as “a love letter for a brand.”
Backer’s own epiphany behind what became known as the hilltop commercial was not quite as blissful.
According to his account in a company-sponsored video, he was on his way to London in January 1971 to meet with the songwriters Billy Davis and Roger Cook when his flight was diverted by fog to Shannon Airport in Ireland.
The next morning, Backer was stunned to see the diverse group of passengers who had been angry the night before cheerfully conversing in the coffee shop.
“People from all over the world, forced by circumstance, were having a Coke — or a cup of coffee or tea — together,” he wrote in his 1993 book, The Care and Feeding of Ideas. “They were making eye contact over a Coke, and they were keeping each other company.”
“That was the basic idea,” he wrote: “to see Coke not as it was originally designed to be — a liquid refresher — but as a tiny bit of commonality between all peoples.”
By the time he flew to Liverpool and was bused to fog-shrouded London, he recalled: “I could see and hear a song that treated the whole world as if it were a person — a person the singer would like to help and get to know. I’m not sure how the lyric should start, but I know the last line.”