Coca-Cola’s 1971 campaign fused the era’s liberation ethos with consumption

Evidence

In 1971, they got another pillar of the establishment, the New York agency McCann Erickson (slogan: “Truth well told”), to express Coke’s own version of liberation and love in what would be the brand’s most enduring campaign. McCann identified the sweetest and most generous aspirations of the era with the buying of Coca-Cola. The result: a canticle to consumption, to fellowship as commerce-and the best damn commercial of the 1970s: * Marcuse had a particularly arcane term for this dynamic by which a putative form of liberation nonetheless manages to perpetuate existing power structures and prop up “the system.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 596

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Pepsi’s innovation was implying consumption transforms the buyer’s identity — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 554

Broader Connections

• Pepsi’s innovation was implying consumption transforms the buyer’s identity #qualifies (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 554