Name: How Santa Became A Coca-Cola Pitchman
Uploaded: 2015-12-24
Duration: 3 min 5 s
Description: He's been selling soda since 1921.

I don't think that people know that the Santa Claus that they're looking at was created by Coca- Cola. Through the years Coca- Cola brand became inextricably linked with Santa Clause and with Christmas. The sales would always slump during the winter and then one of our CEOs, Robert Woodruff, challenged the company to equalize the sales. We came up with the slogan Thirst Knows No Season so that we could begin to entice people to drink coke during the winters as well as the summer. Coca- Cola first used Santa Claus as early as 1921 and we used a couple of variations on him on the slogan Thirst Knows No Season. Those Santas were kind of mean looking. In 1931 the company hired resemblance. It was an advertising genius. He had created the Quaker Oats figure and so we challenged him to come up with a vision of Santa Claus. Hayden's Santa a new step in the direction of Santa in that he had a very warm feeling a very warm look. Someone you wanted to have come into your home. You don't have a tall figure dressed in green and brown anymore, or the little Dwarves. You're gonna have the Coca- Cola Santa Claus. What Coca- Cola did that was so unusual, was that they took a character that was already part of popular culture, Santa Claus, and laid claim to him as a spokesperson for their product. And Coca- Cola being Coca- Cola and a worldwide company, we created billions of pieces of advertising with this figure of St Nick. So that the world impression of Santa Claus is of the Coca- Cola Santa Claus. No longer is he short. No longer is he tall. He's not in green and brown anymore. He's wearing Coca- Cola red and he's got a white beard and he's jolly. [ INAUDIBLE ] Artists that contributed to the evolution of Santa, writers and painters and illustrators. And sometimes his outfit would be blue, sometimes a purple. Those were very popular colors. But the most popular color in printing other than black and white is red. Coca- Cola was very fortunate. Big red logo. Now they had this spokesperson, Santa. And the suit just happens to be Coca- Cola red. It's a perfect match. And honestly there were visions of Santa out there and a red and white dressed Santa Claus was one of the ones out there. But what's gone now is the other versions of Santa Claus. [ MUSIC ] There's a lot of lively debate as to how prevalent the image was prior to 1931, and whether Coca Cola should get a whole lot of credit or very little credit for implanting this image of Santa that we now have in the consumer conscious. If somebody tried to come up with another color, another design, another image it would probably not fly with anybody. Families want tradition. They want the same thing for their children that they had when they were young what their grandparents They want the Coca- Cola look. They want the red suit. [ MUSIC ]