Coca-Cola isn't just a drink, it's one of the most recognized symbols of American culture in the world. Neeve Kelly, Outreach Archivist at the Coca-Cola Company, takes us inside the vault holding over 130 years of advertising, packaging, and cultural history, and explains how one brand ended up shaping everything from what Santa Claus looks like to how Hollywood treats American history on screen.
In 1931, Coca-Cola commissioned Chicago illustrator Haddon Sunblom to paint a standardized Santa, based on the jolly, red suited figure from Clement Moore's 1823 poem The Night Before Christmas. Because Coke's advertising was everywhere, from the Saturday Evening Post to store windows across the country, that single campaign quietly rewrote what the whole world pictures when they picture Santa Claus. It's why documentary crews covering the history of Saint Nick still come knocking on Coca-Cola's door.
Then there's the formula. It genuinely does sit in a vault at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, ceremoniously moved there a few years ago, but the real story is stranger than the legend. It wasn't written down at all until the 1920s, when the company needed it as collateral for a bank loan during a sugar shortage. Before that, it existed only in the heads of Asa Candler's family, who mixed it by smell and feel, ripping the labels off ingredient barrels and replacing them with cryptic numbers and letters so nobody outside the family could reverse engineer it.
Neeve also walks us through how new material gets accessioned into the archive today, the process productions follow when they want to license Coca-Cola's footage, and her own story founding Adidas' first North American archive before she joined Coca-Cola.
This episode is presented by Silver Salt Restoration, the UK's foremost film and television restoration company and part of the John Gore Studios family.
The Archive Room is co-hosted by Dominic Dare and Sandra Coelho, produced by LOLA Clips.
