How a road trip across the USA informed Coca-Cola’s America 250 campaign

Sometimes you need a good old-fashioned American road trip. That’s especially true when you’re creating an ad to celebrate America.

As Coca-Cola’s creative team was crafting its campaign to commemorate America’s 250th birthday this year, they knew they would hit on themes of togetherness and optimism, but they needed some inspiration to land on the story. So they hit the road.

“Let’s just go out there and find the story,” Alex Ames, senior director of content and creative excellence at The Coca-Cola Company, told us. “They went out there and shot. The music and the lyrics came later, inspired by [the team’s] great American road trip.”

The team included members from Coca-Cola, agencies Ogilvy and VML as well as Mayan Productions. They covered 10 states in 20 days to craft a three-minute spot, “Drink in America,” which features an update to 1971’s “Hilltop” jingle, “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke.” (Yes, the same “Hilltop” featured in—spoiler alert—the Mad Men finale.)

“It was probably one of the best road trips I’ve ever had,” Joe Sciarrotta, deputy CCO at Ogilvy Worldwide, said. “We treated it like a family road trip going across the country. We filmed everywhere.”

The team had the mentality of “tornado chasers,” Sciarrotta added, making sure they were “scrappy” enough to capture the moments they had planned but leaving room for “happy accidents” along the way.

More than a TV campaign

The campaign has been in the works since spring of last year. At that time, Coca-Cola briefed several agency teams under its relationship with WPP’s Open X platform. The work, ultimately, was led by Ogilvy, with VML, Burson, Mayan Productions, Optimus Chicago, and Getvast also involved.

“We just want to make sure that it was more than just a TV campaign,” Ames said. “This is a really big moment for the country and for the brand. The first thing we did on our side, that we often do, is look back into our archives for inspiration. I often say that, ‘On this brand, nostalgia is a starting point.’ We’re fortunate enough that we showed up at the bicentennial. We have a long heritage of great campaigns to pull from.”

Coca-Cola brought together creative teams, historians, and pulled out archival campaigns from big American moments to figure out the creative campaign for America 250. The company also used an “AI chatbot that we could sit there and ask questions of American historical figures to get a deeper idea of those moments in American history and Coke’s role,” Ames said.

Shared history

From there, the team wanted to find shared truths between the Coca-Cola brand and that of America, landing on the themes of optimism and togetherness that were also present in the brand’s work for the country’s bicentennial. Once they landed on the themes, the team then went on the road trip for the story.

Aside from creating the three-minute anthem, Coca-Cola is also creating limited-edition America 250 packaging, will be painting murals across the country, has sponsored two weeks of themed shows on Wheel of Fortune, and has set a goal of 250,000 volunteer hours for its more than 84,000 employees.

Connecting the country’s iconography with that of Coca-Cola is also present in some of the out-of-home work for the campaign, with ads featuring Lady Liberty and the Washington Monument as reflections of the old-school glass Coca-Cola bottle.

While advertising today is quite different from that during the bicentennial with a fractured social media landscape, that didn’t change much of how the brand or agency approached the work for this year’s celebration.

“The core values of Coke have never changed since it was introduced and invented,” Sciarrotta said. “What changes is the times and the relevancy and how relevant. So I feel like, maybe the media channels have changed, but not the messaging.”