The Story:  If the consumer’s brain can be compared to a whiteboard, then back in the 70′s, advertisers had relatively clean ones to doodle on, which  can only have improved the impact of marketing campaigns. The Coca-Cola Hilltop campaign was produced at a time when it was still possible to lend very noble qualities to a mass consumer product without running the risk of seeming pedantic or worse, insincere. Not because people lived in a ‘rosier’ world; Vietnam was the first mediatized war and the US saw inflation rise 10% between ’72 and ’74. There was however a definite purity in the flow of communication from seller to buyer simply because, there were fewer messages, less recuperation, and buzz was just a noise that bees made.

The Idea:  Rehabilitating utopic imagery.

Today, the ‘average’ consumer possesses a much deeper knowledge of marketing. The consumer knows that he is being manipulated, and often knows how. Even so, some ad campaigns still have a huge impact. This suggests that a) when the product is desirable, the ad has little effect, the consumer will buy it anyway, but also b) the consumer is sometimes willing to suspend disbelief when faced with a particularly attractive idea.

So why not strive to model society by altering the mirror in which it sees its reflexion?

Audiovisual media function as proactive mirrors of society. And like real mirrors, they are never completely objective. Advertising can choose to be positively subjective or negatively subjective. I believe that they have, to a certain extent, a responsibility to inspire, and that the positive subjectivity of advertising should be inversely proportional to the negativity of the media that vehicles it.

A lot of communicators today would have qualms about using an idea like the Hilltop, but if the media world refuses to use utopia as a creative reference from time to time, then we run the risk of falling into a quagmire of self-referring, second-degree irony.

Of course, it’s easier said than done as proved by Coca-Cola themselves when they tried to recreate the Hilltop success to boost sales of Diet-Coke with a remake that didn’t fly…

Which adds weight to my favourite quote of the moment, by the artist Mondrian:

“One mustn’t adapt, one must create.”

To read about the history of the Hilltop ad: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ccmphtml/colaadv.html