COCA-COLA WORLDWIDE
After Ok the word Coca-Cola is the most global on the Planet
photographs and text by Massimo Pacifico
Every second 40,000 bottles of Coca-Cola are sold worldwide. In 194 countries. Born as a pharmaceutical specialty when it was marketed in 1886, it is today the most recognizable icon of Western lifestyle. It is due to John Pemberton, a pharmacist born in Knoxville, Georgia, who was seeking a remedy for his own opiate addiction. He had been consuming morphine for twenty years to overcome the pain caused by a sword wound in his chest during the Secession War. Pemberton mixed a syrup with sparkling water, added a bit of cocaine (which would disappear in the formula of 1903) and with his product claimed to relieve the growing neuroses of contemporary society from the time the Atlanta Parliament prohibited the use of alcoholic beverages. However, he did not relieve his neurosis, and the remedy for all diseases did not cure his stomach cancer. He died in August 1888, after selling his recipe, almost in misery. The company that had taken over the brand (whose logo in Spencerian italic had been designed by Frank M. Robinson, Pemberton’s first partner) immediately deployed all the tools of the nascent art of marketing to make their soda known.
At the beginning of the 20th century, they spent a million dollars a year in advertising and soon sponsored a hundred million items of all kinds that advertised the brand. Cheever William D’Arcy’s Atlanta advertising agency in the 1930s used, to convince consumers, the most well paid artists of the era, including the well-known Norman Rockwell, the cantor of good America. Billboards that suggested drinking Coca-Cola soon dotted the 600,000 miles of the new US highways. Even Santa Claus became a Coca-Cola testimonial when D’Arcy conceived for Christmas in 1931, the figure of an elderly, jovial and good-natured gentleman, strictly dressed in the institutional colours of Atlanta’s sparkling beverage: red and white. To give him human facets (and until 1964) the illustrator Haddon Sundblom was called in. Even the most well paid Hollywood stars appeared in the brand’s advertising, from Claudette Colbert to Joan Crawford, Clark Gable to Cary Grant and Johnny Weissmuller, while the diffusion of the fridge secured the freshness of the drink even in private homes. The Second World War guaranteed an equally worldwide diffusion to Atlanta’s neurosis remedy. The following photographs were taken in the 90s of the last century and in the very beginning of this one.
Hell Ville, Nosy Be • Madagascar
Old Delhi • India
Amman • Jordan
Mumbai • India
Karakorum Highway • Pakistan
Puertorico
Esna • Egypt
Stone Town, Zanzibar • Tanzania
Montreal • Canada
Kuching • Malaisian Borneo
Kiev • Ukraine
Bridgetown • Barbados
Antanarivo • Madagascar
Lisboa • Portugal
Saint Petersburg • Russia
Bangkok •Thailand