Polar bears are older in Coca-Cola’s advertising than most people realize. In 1922, a French print ad showed a cheerful bear squirting Coke from a bottle into the mouth of a thirsty sun. For the next seven decades, though, the bears turned up only occasionally. The characters people now recognize arrived in 1993.
“Northern Lights”
That year Coca-Cola launched a new global campaign, “Always Coca-Cola,” built around a large number of short, varied TV spots rather than one big ad. One of them, “Northern Lights,” showed a group of computer-animated polar bears gathering on the snow at night, bottles of Coke in their paws, to watch the aurora borealis like an audience at an outdoor movie.
It debuted during the commercial breaks of Game 3 of the 1993 NBA Finals.
The spot’s creator, Ken Stewart, said the bears were inspired by his Labrador retriever, which he thought looked like a polar bear. That detail explains a lot about how they behave on screen: less like wild predators and more like friendly, slightly clumsy dogs.
Why the bears worked
- They matched the product. Cold, snowy settings reinforce the idea of an ice-cold drink, and white bears stand out beautifully against Coke’s red.
- They carried no language. Silent animated animals work in any country without translation, which suited a global campaign.
- They made winter a Coke season. Like Coca-Cola’s Santa ads decades earlier, the bears helped connect a summery drink to the holidays.
- Computer animation was new. In 1993 photorealistic animated animals on TV were still a novelty, which helped the ad get noticed.
The bears became a fixture. Coca-Cola sells polar bear merchandise, from tumblers to plush toys, and the World of Coca-Cola attraction in Atlanta has a walk-around bear costume made by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. In 1995 the company even won an injunction against a rival soft drink maker, the Polar Corporation, over a polar bear advertisement.
The white can problem
Not every polar bear idea worked. For the 2011 holiday season, Coca-Cola replaced its red cans with white ones featuring polar bears, tied to a conservation partnership. Shoppers complained that the white cans were too easy to confuse with Diet Coke, which traditionally uses silver and white, and some felt the drink even tasted different. Coca-Cola switched back to red within about a month.
A mascot facing a real-world problem
The bears have one complication no cartoon mascot can control: the real animal is in trouble. Coke’s animated bears appeared 15 years before polar bears were listed as a threatened species in the United States in 2008, and they have since become a symbol of melting Arctic sea ice. As The New Yorker asked in 2014, a mascot that reminds people of climate change is a harder sell than a cheerful bear on the snow.
Coca-Cola has leaned into that link at times, partnering with conservation groups. The bears remain, three decades on, one of the longest-running characters in soft drink advertising, and a sign of how a one-off idea in a large campaign can outlive everything around it.