Fifty Years of Coca-Cola Television Advertisements

Highlights of Coca-Cola television advertisements from the Library of Congress Motion Picture archives are exhibited on this site, with 50 commercials, broadcast outtakes, and experimental footage.

There are five examples of stop-motion advertisements from the mid-1950s, 18 experiments with color and lighting for television ads from 1964, and well-known commercials, such as the "Hilltop" commercial featuring the song "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" (1971). Additional resources include the "Mean Joe Greene" commercial (1979); the first "Polar Bear" commercial (1993); the "Snowflake" commercial (1999); and "First Experience," an international commercial filmed in Morocco (1999).

The site also includes a bibliography and links to finding aids for other television commercials at the Library of Congress. While this site is relatively small, it provides a good resource for studying the history of post-World War II consumer culture in terms of content and technique.