Coca-Cola Ads Through the Years, From 1886 to the AI Christmas Trucks

Coca-Cola ads through the years, starting in 1886

John Pemberton first sold his syrup at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta on May 8, 1886, at five cents a glass. Three weeks later, on May 29, the first newspaper notice for the drink ran in the Atlanta Journal. It sold the product with a string of exclamations: delicious, refreshing, exhilarating, invigorating. Subtlety came much later.

The man who shaped those early Coca-Cola ads was Frank Mason Robinson, Pemberton’s bookkeeper. He suggested the name, chose the flowing script that is still on every can, and pushed for banners and streetcar signs all over Atlanta. The story of that script, and how little it has changed, is told in the Coca-Cola logo history.

Free coupons and painted walls

Robinson’s best idea was giving the drink away. From 1888, coupons for a free glass were handed out, and they are widely believed to be the first coupons ever used in American marketing. By 1913 the company had redeemed about 8.5 million of them. You could argue that every free sample since owes something to a pharmacy counter in Georgia.

Outdoor advertising followed. The first painted wall sign appeared in 1894 in Cartersville, Georgia, and many more painted walls followed it across the country. The price stayed fixed at five cents from 1886 until 1959, and advertising helped keep it there, since a nickel price printed everywhere was very hard to quietly raise.

How Christmas became part of Coca-Cola ads

The Santa in Coca-Cola ads belongs to Haddon Sundblom, a Chicago illustrator who painted him for the company’s winter campaigns from 1931. Sundblom worked from Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem, the one that begins on the night before Christmas, and used his friend Lou Prentiss as the first model. He kept producing new Santa paintings for about 33 years.

A small correction belongs here, because the myth is everywhere. Coca-Cola did not invent the red-suited Santa. A jolly figure in red and white was already common in American illustration before 1931. What the Christmas paintings did was repeat one warm, rosy version year after year until it felt official. Sundblom also created the Sprite Boy in 1942.

Hilltop, 1971: a song before a commercial

The most famous Coca-Cola commercial began with a delay. On January 18, 1971, fog over London diverted a flight carrying the song’s writers to Shannon in Ireland, where the idea of buying the world a drink took shape while the passengers waited. A radio version aired in February, and the television ad, known as Hilltop, followed in July.

The first shoot, planned for the cliffs of Dover, collapsed after three days of rain. The crew moved to Italy and filmed about 500 young people from embassies and schools in Rome on a nearby hill. The budget passed $250,000, enormous for its time, and the company and its bottlers received more than 100,000 letters.

The song outran the ad. A pop version by The New Seekers reached number one in the UK and the US top ten, and The Hillside Singers had their own hit. The first $80,000 in royalties went to UNICEF. In 2015 the final scene of Mad Men cut straight to Hilltop, and a new generation went looking for it.

Coca-Cola ads with Mean Joe Greene and the polar bears

Mean Joe Greene’s ad first aired on October 1, 1979, during Monday Night Football. A Pittsburgh Steelers lineman accepts a bottle from a young fan, drains it, then tosses the boy his jersey. It won a Clio, and its rerun at Super Bowl XIV in 1980 made it one of the best-known Super Bowl commercials.

Coca-Cola remade it in 2009 for Coke Zero with Troy Polamalu in Greene’s place, and versions abroad cast local stars such as Diego Maradona. The polar bears have an even longer past. A French print ad from 1922 showed a bear squirting the drink into the mouth of a thirsty, smiling sun, which is stranger than anything that came later.

The animated bears arrived in 1993 with a short film called Northern Lights, broadcast during Game 3 of the NBA Finals as part of the Always Coca-Cola campaign. They became one of the brand’s most popular symbols, a story that sits alongside other brand mascots. In 2011 the company pledged $2 million to the World Wildlife Fund.

Share a Coke and the names on the bottle

That same year, polar bear holiday cans drew consumer complaints, and the company reverted the design after a month. A better idea was running in Australia in 2011. Share a Coke replaced the logo on bottles with popular first names, turning a supermarket fridge into a hunt for your own name or a friend’s.

The campaign reached the UK in 2013 and eventually more than 70 countries. Reports in 2014 credited it with lifting US sales by more than 2 percent after a decade of decline. In 2015 the list grew to 1,000 names, and in 2016 song lyrics replaced them. Few famous advertising campaigns have changed through the years this often.

Christmas trucks, and the AI versions of 2024 and 2025

The Holidays Are Coming ad debuted in 1995, with a convoy of red lorries strung with lights rolling through snowy towns. It was replaced in 2001, then returned in 2007 after viewers said the trucks marked the start of Christmas for them. Few ads have been missed so openly, or brought back simply because the audience asked.

In November 2024 Coca-Cola released three new versions of the truck ad, each made by a different studio with generative AI. Viewers called them soulless, though one post of the ad on X passed 56 million views. A spokesperson described a collaboration of human storytellers and generative AI. More on that debate sits in the guide to Christmas ads.

Coca-Cola did not back away. In November 2025 it released another AI holiday ad, and its executives said this version was different from the year before. As of 2026, the trucks, the bears and the Sundblom Santa all still appear in Coca-Cola ads each winter, which leaves one open question: will viewers ever accept a Santa nobody actually painted?