Santa Claus is without a doubt the most recognizable figure associated with Christmas. Santa stands for goodness, kindness and a generous, giving spirit. Today, Santa is an essential part of Christmas celebration, but the modern role and image of Santa Claus saw the light in early America of the 19th century. Dutch, British and American influences came together to give us the Santa Claus that we all know today: the jolly old man with his red & white costume, distributing gifts with his team of elves and reindeers.

The name Santa Claus was Anglicized from “Sinterklaas,” the Dutch word for Saint Nicholas, famous gift-giver and protector of children. It is believed the legend of Santa was brought to the New World by Christopher Columbus, who, upon arriving in Haiti, named a port after the patron saint. In 1621, when the Dutch landed on the New York island of Manhattan, they erected a statue of Saint Nicholas as a tribute to him for their successful journey.

In 1809, Washington Irving (a member of the NYC Historical Society which promoted St. Nicholas as its patron saint), created a tale of a chubby, pipe-smoking Saint Nicholas who rode a magic horse through the air visiting all houses in New York. The elfish figure was small enough to slide down chimneys with gifts for the good children and switches for the bad ones.
The works of writer Clement Clark Moore and the cartoons of Thomas Nast had also a big influence on the present form of Santa. The stories of St. Nicholas, Santa Clause and Kriss Kringle mingled to the new character of Santa Claus, the sum total of several stories, customs and beliefs.

Around the world, most people know Santa Claus and have local-language names for Santa – even if they come from countries where Christmas is not celebrated. Santa or similar gift givers go by these translations in the following countries: “Le Père Noël” (France and Québec), “Weihnachtsmann” or “Nikolaus” (Germany), Papá Noel” (Spain and Mexico), “Joulupukki” (Finland), “Julenissen” (Norway), “Juletomten” (Sweden), “Babadimri” (Albania), “Gaghant Baba” (Armenia), “” (Denmark), “Babbo Natale” (Italy), “Papai Noel” (Brazil), “Санта-Клаус” (Russia), “Ježíšek” (Czech Republic), “Święty Mikołaj” (Poland), “Pai Natal” (Portugal), “Moş Crăciun” (Romania), “Daidí na Nollag” (Ireland and Scottish Highlands), “Dyado Koleda” (Bulgaria), “Noel Baba” (Turkey), “Deda Mraz” (Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina). But our favorite is without a doubt the Afghanese name for Santa: “Baba Chaghaloo”. And the Chinese name also sounds very cool: Sheng Dan Lauw Yeh Yeh (phonetics of 圣诞老爷, which means “Christmas Old Man”).

In England Father Christmas is a stern version of Santa Claus who brings gifts on Christmas Eve. In France “Pere Noel” brings gifts to children on Christmas Eve. Children leave their shoes by the fireplace. In Germany families go to church on Christmas Eve. While they are at church the “Christkind” or Christ Child brings presents to their homes. In Switzerland the “Christkindl” or Christ Child brings the gifts. In some towns, Christkindl is an angel who comes down from heaven to give gifts.

The Dutch “Sinterklaas” arrives by boat from Spain. Children leave their shoe on the eve of 6th December filled with hay and carrots for the donkey which carries St. Nicholas’ pack of toys. Children get toys and candy. In Sweden, a gnome called “Juletomten” brings gifts in a sleigh driven by goats.
In Spanish-speaking countries such as Spain, Mexico, South America, children wait until January 6th for their presents. The Three Kings or Wise Men bring the gifts. Children put shoes by the front door to get their gifts. There is usually a big procession through the streets with floats for each of the Wise men. In Italy “La Befana” is a good witch who dresses all in black. Children leave their shoes by the fireplace on the eve of January 6th. Befana comes down the chimney on her broomstick to leave gifts. In Australia, Santa rides waterskis, has a white beard and red bathing suit and sometimes even has “bikini helpers”.

When the name Santa Claus is mentioned anywhere in America today, the image that invariably comes to mind is the one created by Haddon Sundblom for the Coca-Cola Company. From 1931 to 1964, Sundblom painted new Santa illustrations to use in the Coca-Cola Christmas advertising. Today, Coca-Cola continues to use Sundblom’s Santa Claus artworks. Many of his Santa paintings have toured museums and art institutes around the world. The smiling figure still appears regularly on posters and in magazines, newspapers, calendars, Christmas tree ornaments, serving trays and glassware.

Coca-Cola Christmas artworks by RockAndRoll Agency. Art Direction: Wouter De Coster. Brand Team Coca-Cola: Guy Rombouts & Bram Clincke. All Rights Reserved © The Coca-Cola Company.

More than 120 years after pharmacist John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola, people from all over the world are still as much in love with this most famous of soft drinks as our great-grandparents were. Hold up a Coke and you proclaim all that’s best about the American way of life: Coca-Cola is a happy girl on a summer day, a vintage neon sign outside your hometown bar, first dates and shy kisses, the worldwide symbol of friendship…

Coca-Cola is also one of the most succesful companies and world’s most popular brand. Nothing can be so much a part of popular culture and everyday life, without sparking curious minds. Since the early days of the brand, people are especially fascinated by the Coca-Cola Company’s top-secret recipe for Coca-Cola. The true source of Coke’s unique flavor lies not in the coca/cola combination but in a special mix of oils and flavorings, including the mysterious ingredient known as “Merchandise 7X”, which no outsider has yet succeeded in identifying.

Asa Candler’s son, Charles Howard Candler, summed up the Coca-Cola mystique in these words: “One of the proudest moments of my life came when my father initiated me into the mysteries of the secret flavoring formula, inducting me into the “Holy of Holies”. No written formulae were shown. Containers of ingredients, from which the labels had been removed, were identified only by sight, smell, and remembering where each was put on the shelf. To be safe, my father stood by me several times while I compounded these distinctive flavors with particular reference to the order in which they should be measured out and mixed and I thereupon experienced the thrill of making up with his guidance a batch of Merchandise 7X.”

Coca-Cola’s formula is without a doubt one of the most closely-held trade secrets in modern business. Coca-Cola Argentina just released the animated commercial “Hidden Formula”, a funny take on Coke’s extremely valuable secret. Written, art directed & produced by Santo Buenos Aires for Coca-Cola Argentina, the TV & cinema spot reveals all about the secret secrets of Coca-Cola hidden formula. Enjoy!

Credits: Agency: Santo, Buenos Aires / General Creative Directors: Sebastián Wilhelm – Pablo Minces – Maximiliano Anselmo / Art Director: Maximiliano Anselmo / Director: David Daniels, Ray Di Carlo / Music: Swing Music / Copywriter: Pablo Minces / Agency Producer: Ezequiel Ortiz Production Company: Bent Image Lab, Portland / The Coca-Cola Company Project Lead: Marina Palma

Though he was not the first artist to create an image of Santa Claus for Coca-Cola advertising, Haddon Sundblom’s version became the standard for other Santa renditions and is the most-enduring and widespread depiction of the holiday icon to this day.
Coca-Cola’s Santa artworks would change the world’s perception of the North Pole’s most-famous resident forever and would be adopted by people around the world as the popular image of Santa.

In the 1920s, The Coca-Cola Company began to promote soft drink consumption for the winter holidays in U.S. magazines. The first Santa ads for Coke used a strict-looking Claus.
In 1930, a Coca-Cola advertised with a painting by Fred Mizen, showing a department store Santa impersonator drinking a bottle of Coke amid a crowd of shoppers and their children.
Not long after, a magical transformation took place. Archie Lee, then the agency advertising executive for The Coca-Cola Company, wanted the next campaign to show a wholesome Santa as both realistic and symbolic. In 1931, the Company commissioned Haddon Sundblom, a Michigan-born illustrator and already a creative giant in the industry, to develop advertising images using Santa Claus. Sundblom envisioned this merry gentleman as an opposite of the meager look of department store Santa imitators from early 20th century America.

Sundblom turned to Clement Moore’s classic poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (better known as “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”) for inspiration. The ode’s description of the jolly old elf inspired Sundblom to create an image of Santa that was friendly, warm and human, a big change from the sometimes-harsh portrayals of Santa up to that time. He painted a perfectly lovable patron saint of the season, with a white beard flowing over a long red coat generously outlined with fur, an enormous brass buckle fastening a broad leather belt, and large, floppy boots.

Sundblom’s Santa was very different from the other Santa artworks: he radiated warmth, reminded people of their favorite grandfather, a friendly man who lived life to the fullest, loved children, enjoyed a little honest mischief, and feasted on snacks left out for him each Christmas Eve.
Coca-Cola’s Christmas campaign featuring this captivating Santa ran year after year. As distribution of Coca-Cola and its ads spread farther around the world, Sundblom’s Santa Claus became more memorable each season, in more and more countries. The character became so likable, The Coca-Cola Company and Haddon Sundblom struck a partnership that would last for decades. Over a span of 33 years, Haddon Sundblom painted imaginative versions of the “Coca-Cola Santa Claus” for for Coke advertising, retail displays and posters.

Sundblom initially modeled Santa’s smiling face after the cheerful looks of a friend, retired salesman Lou Prentiss. “He embodied all the features and spirit of Santa Claus,” Sundblom said. “The wrinkles in his face were happy wrinkles.” After Prentiss passed away, the Swedish-American Sundblom used his own face as the ongoing reference for painting the now-enduring, modern image of Santa Claus.

In 1951, Sundblom captured the Coca-Cola Santa “making his list and checking it twice.” However, the ads did not acknowledge that bad children existed and showed pages of good boys and girls only.
Mischievous and magical, the Coca-Cola Santa was not above raiding the refrigerator during his annual rounds, stealing a playful moment with excited children and pets, or pausing to enjoy a Coca-Cola during stops on his one-night, worldwide trek. When air adventures became popular, Santa also could be caught playing with a toy helicopter around the tree.

Haddon Sundblom passed away in 1976, but The Coca-Cola Company continues to use a variety of his timeless depictions of Saint Nicholas in holiday advertising, packaging and other promotional activities. The classic Coca-Cola Santa images created by Sundblom are as ubiquitous today as the character they represent and have become universally accepted as the personification of the patron saint of both children and Christmas.

Source: The Coca-Cola Company

Over the years, the Coca-Cola Company has had many slogans in their advertising campaigns, inviting people to take a moment off from their hasty activity: 1924 – “Pause and Refresh Yourself”; 1926 – “Stop at the Red Sign”; 1927 – “Around the Corner from Anywhere. At the Little Red Sign”; 1929 – “The Pause that Refreshes”; 1941 – “A Stop That Belongs On Your Daily Timetable”; 1947 – “Relax With The Pause That Refreshes”…

Today, more than ever, we lead fast paced lives and don’t take a break as often as we should. We continue to work over lunch time to finish a presentation or take some deadline work with us on our weekends or vacation. There’s always something that keeps us going.
But even in these hectic times, we still feel the need to take some quality time off. A pause is the ideal time to spend time with the people you love, to go outside and discover the beauty of nature, hang out with friends, watch the waves at the beach, have an ice-cold Coca-Cola, tell and listen to stories, take a long run in the park, light some incense, go to bed with a nice book or movie, listen to our favorite music, lay down and close our eyes. Enjoy & chill out!

Graphic artist Zoolo Boy came up with this design of a Coca-Cola traffic light. It doesn’t stop traffic, time or deadline stress, but it’s pretty cool. If you like the vector illustration, you can download the Illustrator eps file from the zoolo.net website.

A shiny red can that reads “Coca-Cola” and a whole list of ingredients: carbonated water, sugar, caramel, phosphoric acid, caffeine and natural flavorings. Coca-Cola is all about the magic of good taste & flavor – and apparently something highly secret. The natural flavorings are a unique blend of vegetable extracts and spices from around the world. Coca-Cola has never told what the 7 secret ingredients are, and this “Merchandise 7X” has remained the world’s most famous trade secret since Coca-Cola’s invention in 1886.

When John Stith Pemberton sold the first glass of Coca-Cola in his pharmacy in 1886, he was entering a new market for soda fountain tonics that promised health benefits along with refreshment. In 1869, Pemberton already experimented extensively with extracts of the coca leaf and kola nut, initially marketing a moderately successful health drink called “French Wine Coca.” Fifteen years later, one of Pemberton’s partners, Frank M. Robinson, invented the name Coca-Cola, derived from its central ingredients. Robinson also registered the product’s famous script logo. A marketing phenomenon was born.

From that day on, there has always been a mystique about the “secret formula” of Coca-Cola. Folklore even said that the original beverage contained cocaine, at least until the “Pure Food and Drugs Act” was voted in 1906. The official position of the Coca-Cola Company, however, is that the drink contained extracts of the coca leaf, but never the drug. Over the years, the Coke’s attorneys have fought in court to protect Coca-Cola’s secret formula. It’s been said that the ingredient list is kept in a security vault in a bank in Atlanta, Georgia and only a few employees know the full recipe, and those employees are not allowed to fly on the same plane and cannot be left alone with strangers while they are together. Over the years, Coca-Cola’s secret formula has been the subject of books, speculation and marketing lore.

But the real “secret ingredients” reach far above vegetable extracts or spices. Coca-Cola’s true magic is all about love, perspective, universality, friendship, purpose, humor and optimism. It’s a way of living spontaneous & finding happiness. It’s the belief that together we can create a more positive reality, where global love and joy rule supreme.

The current global “The Coke Side of Life” advertising campaign invites people to live in full color and listen to their hearts. The “Coke Side” is the positive side of life and focusses on universal experiences. Coke is probably the most famous cultural icon that links people from all-over the world. At its core, the concept of sharing is the purest essence of Coca-Cola. Drinking a Coca-Cola brings people from different nationalities, cultures and walks of life together. “The Pause that Refreshes” is a universal language and global connector, happiness in a bottle.

Coca-Cola Remix Art: “Universal Love on the Coke Side of Life” by Yker Moreno / DJ Spinbalon.

When the young Andy Warhol graduated from college in June 1949, he immediately moved to New York. It took him only three months to begin a brilliant career as a commercial artist. Appropriately enough, Warhol’s first assignment was to illustrate an article in Glamour magazine, “Success is a Job in New York”.
Influenced by the early work of pop artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann, Warhol quickly made the decision to take the leap into “real art”.
In the early sixties, Warhol had become a commercial artist with painterly ambitions – asked by a dealer why his works were smudged, he replied, “But you have to drip. Otherwise they think you’re not sensitive”.
To Warhol, it was a matter of no small interest that the avant-garde could come so close to his own world of commercial art.

Warhol’s early comic strip works were clearly inspired by the work of Roy Lichtenstein, but Warhol quickly found his own style. His iconic portraits of Dollar signs and postage stamps, Coca-Cola bottles, cans and signs; Campbell’s, Mott’s, Kellog’s and Del Monte’s packagings; celebrities such as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy; tabloids and newspapers such as Daily News and New York Post as well as his recreations of violent imagery from race riots to car crashes, quickly earned the young artist a reputation. Warhol also moved into experimental filmmaking, publishing and multimedia ventures, all the while adding fuel to the Warhol myth.

In 1966, Warhol began presenting The Velvet Underground, the legendary underground band fronted by Lou Reed, John Cale & Nico as part of his traveling multimedia show called the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable”. A year later, he produced their debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico. The album cover designed by Warhol is so iconic that people often refer to it as the “Warhol LP” or the “Banana album”.

In art, even the recent past is another country. To experience a frisson of how it felt when Pop Art started to be made, felt and understood radically differently in the early 1960s, visit the current exposition “Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms” at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, USA. Running from Sept 13, 2008 until Feb 15, 2009, “Other Voices, Other Rooms” (named for the Truman Capote novel of the same name) sheds a new light on the celebrated pop artist and focuses on the ideas at the heart of Warhol’s work from the 1950′s through to the 1980′s: embracing consumer culture, exploring sexual identity, challenging social conventions, and erasing distinctions between high and low culture.

This travelling show of ultimate Andy Warhol trivia, is organised by Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Moderna Museet Stockholm in collaboration with The Andy Warhol Museum and presents Warhol’s films, screen-tests, videos and television programmes, which combined with extraordinary archive material, seminal paintings and installations, illuminates his creative process.

Besides Warhol’s film and video work, the exhibit focuses also on less known aspects of the artist by showing some miscellaneous extras. Warhol was obsessive about collecting and on display here are a few of the 600 time capsules that he made in the 1960s, self-consciously establishing a repository of the essential elements of the cultural Zeitgeist that swirled around him. These took the form of cardboard boxes full of old postcards, Christmas cards, telephone notes, photographs, cinema tickets and the odd T-shirt. There are covers of his magazine Interview. There are books, contact sheets, photomat strips and wonderful expanses of his wallpaper: Chairman Mao, cows and Warhol’s face repeated hundreds of times in bright colours.

Wexner Center director Sherri Geldin: “Upon visiting this astounding and ingenious exhibition in Amsterdam late last year, I immediately set the wheels in motion to bring it to the Wexner Center. It explores afresh the remarkable legacy of an artist who utterly transformed the cultural landscape of his own time, but also foretold with uncanny prescience today’s media-obsessed society”.

The mix of celebrity and the underground, reality and artifice, a culture without hierarchies of image or thought, the subtle eroticisation of almost anything he touched: Andy Warhol presented a visual and conceptual overload which emphasises that, inescapably and from all sides, Warhol is our contemporary. “Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms” illuminates his creative process, sheds new light on his work and explores his genius for discerning the way pop culture penetrates our lives.

You can find more info on the Wexner website.

Warhol’s influence on society has steadily grown in the two decades since his death in 1987 and has yet not reached its zenith. Warhol’s ideas were “far out” during his lifetime but are coming more and more to resemble life as we know it. Over the course of 30 years, more and more people have understood that Warhol’s
art opened up opened up a territory as large as the world itself: a large and fascinating universe including Hollywood stars, Coca-Cola bottles, underground movies and music, mysteries and terrors, humor and wit.

Tom Armstrong, the first director of Pittsburgh’s Warhol museum, describes the “Pope of Pop” as a key figure in contemporary culture: “More than any other figure of his time, Warhol challenged our way of thinking about art. Andy was a painter, a sculptor, a graphic artist, a filmmaker, a music producer, an author, a publisher. The scope of his creative activity was extraordinary and it touched on the entire range of popular culture”.

In the foreword of the book “Andy Warhol Portraits”, American art historian and curator Robert Rosenblum stated that this was only the beginning of the story: “Warhol quickly emerged as a leader of the Pop Art movement. His work provided an instantly intelligible chronicle of what mattered most to people, from the dead of Marilyn Monroe to the ascendancy of Red China.”
Rosenblum compares Warhol’s art to a March of Time newsreel: “An abbreviated visual anthology of the most conspicuous headlines, mythic creatures, personalities, movie and music stars, tragedies, artworks, even ecological problems of recent decades. Everything and everybody is here – with infinitely more speed and wallop than a complete run of New York Times on microfilm: airplane crashes and volcanic eruptions, electric chairs, President Nixon, and the Thirteen Most Wanted Men, giant pandas, the hammer-and-sickle, transvestites, Santa Claus and Raphael’s Sistine Madonna”.

Warhol’s greatest gift was probably his observational ability. From his ubercool stance as the silent watcher, Warhol took it all in and saw it for how it truly was.
Warhol’s art reflected the contemporary culture of the United States, and therefore of a world culture that was coming more and more under the American influence. He addressed the changes brought about in our society through mass productions and mass communications in a way that was daring and yet instantly accessible.
By creating artworks inspired by consumer goods as Coca-Cola bottles, Heinz boxes or Campbell’s Soup cans, Warhol presented the world with genuine philosophical challenges.

For the first time in ages, painting was addressing the world at large, and the world knew it was being addressed. But there was a second level to the mass media controversy: not what Warhol painted, but how. Some of his first Pop artworks were made by hand and showed evidence of great skill.

In his later works, Warhol’s hand became less evident. To produce his pictures of Marilyn and Elvis, he made silkscreens print of photographs, which he colored with the aid of stencils. This method offended art critics who wanted to see traces of the artist’s personality on the canvas, or proof of his hard work. But that objection seemed to miss the point.

Warhol had adopted the methods of mass production to make images of celebrities who were themselves mass produced. Marilyn Monroe existed not only as a flesh-and-blood person but as millions of pictures in magazines and newspapers, on album covers, movie screens and film posters. She was infinitely reproducible.

Warhol also understood America’s fascination with celebrity. The “celebrity concept” had an incredible impact on American culture and it quickly became the N°1 topic for Warhol and the Pop Art movement. By becoming a true celebrity himself, something that hadn’t been done before by any US artists, Warhol invented a new approach to America’s fascination with fame.
Andy Warhol’s life is a great example of somebody who courted fame and publicity, achieved it, yet never really gave much away about his “real” personality. Just as is the case with Coca-Cola’s secret formula, the public was really fascinated by the high level of secrecy Warhol managed to surround himself with.

Warhol had been obsessed with fame ever since his childhood when he collected autographs from stars, but what fascinated him the most about the subject was the difference between truth and reality in the world of Hollywood. Warhol subscribed to the postmodern concept of truth as a subjective value and adored the tabloids. In his book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, Warhol talks a lot about fame: “A good reason for being famous is so you can read all the big magazines and know everybody in all the stories.”
Warhol even created his own magazine in 1969, Interview, which he claimed he started so that he and his friends would always be invited to the movie premieres and best parties. And of course, starstruck as he was, Warhol always liked to hang around with the popsingers, actors & actresses or other superstars.

Warhol’s most famous quotes are on the subject of fame and the fifteen minutes he felt everyone would get. When he made this statement, it may have sounded like a throwaway soundbite but fact is that in today’s world of cross-genre multi-media, obsessive celebrity madness, reality TV with it’s non-stop “new star” bombardments, Warhol’s philosophy has never been so closely felt.

Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame run on …

What makes a website great? Information, interactivity, freebies, … A sense of humor can help too. But what makes a website really compelling is that it’s useful, relevant & engaging for the visitors.
When Coca-Cola Brazil was looking to bring their website to the next level they put all their trust in Grïngo, an award-winning multimedia agency based in São Paulo and true visionaries in the interactive field. Over the last year, Grïngo has been creating a huge buzz for Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola Light & Coca-Cola Zero with several extremely popular and anticipated projects. If you want to see flashes of genius & get some real cool web action, check out the links below. Expect the unexpected!

Coca-Cola Zero Celular

Karaokê Coca-Cola Zero

Coca-Cola Clothing Dance

Coca-Cola Light – Sabores do Mundo

Micha Klein graduated from the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, in 1989 as the first artist to receive a BA in computer graphics. The same year, Klein started exhibiting his gigantic photographic panels in prestigious galleries around the world.

Klein was already known as a successful VJ and experienced a breakthrough on the international club scene before he made it as an artist. Pioneer of the VJ-scene, Micha Klein introduced his rhythmic editing of computer graphics and video images at the first Acid house parties in 1988. In the nineties, he introduced the VJ concept in Ibiza, where he held a residency in legendary club Pacha. The rest of the world would follow fast. Over the years, Klein has seen how things have technically evolved and how the VJ-scene has boomed: “The new equipment and software create new possibilities. We live in a multimedia age, so we can’t live on music alone anymore. Visuals will become an integral part of electronic culture, and in the future DJ’s will become Media Jockey’s” (note: with this 90′s quote, Micha proved to be a real visionary – anno 2008, the age of the Media Jockey has begun with tools as the Pioneer SVM 1000).

In 1998, the Groninger Museum honored him with a retrospective dedicated to 10 years of his graphic production and videos. In 2003, Klein was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to the international VJ scene during the AVIT UK summit.

Klein’s artworks are a significant crossover between art, multimedia, video art, VJing, marketing and advertising. They attract attention for their digital approach, surrealistic shapes & objects and bright colors and tell stories of a world that revisits pop art and culture. Klein doesn’t portray reality; he likes to create his own reality.
With his computer manipulated images and psychedelic computer palette, Klein explores the media based culture of our time. He mixes music, club culture, fashion, beauty and mass media to create a wondrous universe somewhere between dream and reality.

The people and landscapes in his artworks are just too beautiful & perfect. They appear unreal, even unearthly. In his series ‘Artificial Beauty’ (1998), Klein generated a new fictitious generation of beautiful young people, taking over the top the all too perfect beings and settings we encounter in advertisements.
By doing so, Klein also shows that today’s photography has no more to do with reality than other types of images. Even the most stunning models are given a Photoshop make-over. The end result is highly artificial, and comments on the aspects of society that Klein finds fascinating yet problematic such as artificial beauty and plastic surgery.

The aesthetics of advertising and elements of everyday and popular culture have always been an integrated element Klein’s art, and he brings everything that is usable over from this world. In true pop art tradition, Micha Klein is a big but critical fan of the techniques and concepts of advertising. Just like Damien Hirst, Klein believes that art must compete with commercial and spectacular expressions: “My work must be as seductive as advertising and entertainment. If not, it loses its visibility in a culture saturated by media, constantly bombarding us with commercial messages. Since these messages have become part of the mainstream culture, it is vital that artists especially can infiltrate this culture with their subversive ideas.”

Over the last years, Micha Klein has worked in clubs around the world and collaborated with superstar DJ Tiësto on visuals for his live-sets and created background projections for Eminem’s concert tour, based on his notorious character Pillman. Klein also did all the artworks for the Dutch dance festival Mysteryland, designed the animations for Jacky Chan’s ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ movie and did commercial work for companies and brands as Swatch, Philips, Endemol, KPN, Mustang Jeans, Heineken, Hugo Boss and Samsung.

For his first Coca-Cola commercial, Micha Klein managed to put in a girl in a ‘Make Love, Not War’ T-shirt (just before the 2nd Gulf war), a boy wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt the war and girls licking each others faces. The video with music by Monte La Rue, introducing Coca-Cola’s new visual identity by Desgrippes Gobé, was sold to 25 Coca-Cola markets, a lot in Central and South America.

Klein’s commercial jobs and his works of art have a number of parallels in form & content: “It’s fun to stretch the image of a company in directions they never would imagine, to sort of pile your own layer of meaning on top of theirs, to inject some of my own ideas”.
Klein always tries to inject some of his own ideas in his commercial work. “I try to talk to the client and tell them they should transform their strategy to become a ‘good company’, to be closer to their consumers and do community projects. Give back to the people… I think in the future companies will be judged on that”.
By doing commercial assignments, Klein can finance his own art, and is not dependent on government subsidies, which gives him more freedom.

The music & club culture is still a key component in Klein’s work; at times he prefers the unceremonious gathering at clubs to the seriousness of galleries or museums.
For the Coca-Cola commercial “Bubble Dream Girl”, Klein could combine his passion for dance floors and advertising. The clip was shot in Malaga on 35mm, with a 50 people crew and 80 extras. Graphics & special effects were added in post production and his friend Tiësto did the soundtrack.

Last year (2007), ‘Speeding on the Virtual Highway’, a documentary about Micha Klein’s life & work was shown at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Director Corinne van Egeraat follows Klein as he works on his his new art series. This unique time document shows us how fast digital developments go and how quickly the times they are a-changin’, especially in the case of Klein’s creative way of living.

Over 400 years ago, Sir Isaac Newton wrote in his scientific book “Principia Mathematica”: “If a leaden cannon ball is horizontally propelled by a powder charge from a cannon positioned on a hilltop, it will follow a curving flight path until it hits the ground … You can make it turn 10°, 30° and 90° before it touches the ground. You can force it to circle the Earth and even disappear into outer space, going away to infinity.”

On October 4, 1957, Newton’s hypothesis was proven correct. The Sputnik, a 183-pound shiny sphere, lifted off from the steppes of Kazahkstan, part of the former USRR. The “Space Age” had officially begun… The satellite’s prime payload was a radio transmitter sending out a harmless “beep-beep-beep” signal merely to declare its existence.
Nevertheless, the Sputnik struck fear into the hearts of Cold War Americans, who realized that the Soviets could just as well have lofted a nuclear-tipped missile to the US. Four years later, left the Soviets the USA behind in even more prestigious race. Yuri Gagarin became the first man, who orbited planet Earth in a manned spacecraft and returned home safely (the probability of a successful launch was estimated at only 50 percent, and no one even hoped that the cosmonaut would ever return).

One of the ironies of the Soviet space successes was that America’s paranoia about its technological gap led to a “first renaissance” in science education and huge investments (in the sixties, 5% of the federal budget went to space technology).
The Americans played catch-up, but initial efforts failed to make it anywhere near space and were nicknamed ‘Kaputnik” and ‘Stayputnik’ by the American press. But billions of dollars later, in 1969, the Americans emerged as victors when Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 touched down on the moon.
In the Fifties, Russia seemed invincible in space. But finally the US won the Space Race with seven missions to the moon, while the Soviet moon program faltered.

In the years to come, the American space program would also suffer painful setbacks. On Jan. 28, 1986 , the space shuttle Challenger was destroyed 73 seconds after liftoff when rocket booster seal failed, leading to a subsequent fireball and the deaths of all seven astronauts aboard (including Christa McAuliffe, the first school teacher to launch spaceward).
Seventeen years later, another seven astronauts died when the Columbia orbiter, NASA’s oldest shuttle, broke apart during reentry on Feb. 1, 2003 after a successful 16-day science mission.
Each fatal accident grounded NASA spacecraft as the agency rooted out their causes and dealt out new safety plans before again launching astronauts into space. It took more than two years following both the Challenger and Columbia accident before NASA launched another shuttle.
The disaster occurring with the Challenger and Columbia were vivid reminders of the risks inherent to human spaceflight.

Today, the Americans and Russians have come to complement each other: NASA has been focusing on reusable transports (a fleet of space shuttles), while Russia has concentrated on studies of long-duration flight and a series of space stations.

Space programs have become so expensive, that no nation is able to conduct a space program in isolation. The former rivals are bound in space now. To make future projects happen, they have teamed up with Japan’s National Space Development Agency and the European Space Agency. Together they fill the sky with billions of dollars worth of telecommunications satellites, while a new generation of low-orbit satellite networks promises to extend and improve global communication even more.

Coca-Cola in Space

As the N°1 brand in the world, Coca-Cola always needs to stay a step ahead on the competition. To do so, no investment is spared. At the Coca-Cola Company, the motto seems to be “Dream big & make good ideas happen.” The sky is the limit – sometimes even literally.

In the late 19th century already, Coca-Cola owner Asa G. Candler put all his energy and money to break open a larger market. Candler spent huge advertising budgets on point-of-sales signs, newspapers ads, calendars, coupons & novelties, all of them prominently displaying the Coca-Cola logo. By the end of 1895, Candler could proudly proclaim that “Coca-Cola is now sold and drunk in every state of the United States”.

Robert W. Woodruff, Coke’s president from 1923 until 1954, wanted Coke to be “within arm’s reach of desire, around the world”, so he established an export department in 1926 and developed the first international bottling network.
When World War II broke out, Woodruff convinced his board of directors to make sure that no soldier had to go to war without America’s favorite drink – regardless the cost to the company. The Coke managers and technical crews had to overcome the most incredible difficulties of production and transport, but they managed to meet Woodruff’s target. At the cost of 5 Dollar cents a bottle, American GI’s could have their “Pause that refreshes” everywhere they had to go, even in the most inaccessible places or where the battle was fiercest. By the time the war was over, Coke had sold over 5 billion bottles.
Before WWII, Coca-Cola was bottled in 44 countries; by the sixties this figure had more than doubled. Coca-Cola’s bottling system was expanded to the largest and most widespread production and distribution network in the world. Coca-Cola grew into a global symbol of the American way of life.

Now that Coca-Cola was a global success story, it would take something fairly outlandish to raise eyebrows. In the eighties, CEO Roberto Goizueta had a new challenge for Coke, to boldly go where no soda has gone before… Coke’s packaging experts teamed up with NASA engineers to develop the CBDE (Carbonated Beverage Dispenser Evaluation). In 1985, astronauts tested the “Coca-Cola Space Can” aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. The experiment was not really a success, due to the lack of refrigeration and the zero gravity conditions, but on the lighter side of space, floating “soda balls” did provide a source of entertainment for the astronauts.
Do you wonder how far New Coke did go? The STS-51F Challenger with New Coke on board traveled for 7 days, 22 hours & 45 minutes; covered a distance of 3,283,543 miles and completed 127 orbits.

Six years later, in 1991, Coca-Cola and Soviet space agency NPO Energia successfully tested an improved version of the Coca-Cola Space Can on board the Soviet space station Mir.
The 3rd trip was in 1995, this time with the Coca-Cola Space Dispenser on board (Aka the FGBA or “Fluids Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus”). The dispenser was designed to contain 1.65 liters each of Coca-Cola and Diet Coke and provide astronauts the opportunity to enjoy a refreshment break. They had to dispense their drink into a “Fluids Transfer Unit” (a sealed drinking cup) through a quick connect on the dispenser. To save power, the dispenser would chill the liquid when it was about to be consumed. As the drink passed from the storage container to the drinking can, it would flow past cooling coils that would chill it, one drink at a time. The design incorporated a unique baffle and thin vanes at its bottom to keep the liquid and carbon dioxide (CO2) from separating.

In 1996, another innovative fountain dispenser (serving Coca-Cola, diet Coke and hydration drink Powerade) was launched aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
Over the years, Coca-Cola made a serious investment into their space research. In addition to a desire to offer a refreshment for astronauts, Coca-Cola was also observing the effects of space flight on changes in taste perception.

Now that JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) announced its goal to build an inhabitable base on the moon by 2030, the lunar base construction workers and astronauts can be sure that their Coke will be cold & tasty, just like at home.
And if we ever find extraterrestrial life, we would not be surprised to see that the magic of Coca-Cola’s universal charisma also works in outer space.

Coke is Out of This World!

Ad campaign: Coke is out of this world!
Illustrations by Tex Grubbs / Art Director: Tanya Frank / Copywriter: Craig Moyer

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Tex Grubbs is a squirrel tamer turned Illustrator (story goes that he lost 6 of his 10 fingers to the exciting and dangerous world of squirrel taming; now he draws and paints with his mouth and feet).
He was born & raised in Dallas, Texas (yes, Tex is his real name). Tex’s passion for drawing began as a child within the pages of “Calvin & Hobbes”, “The Farside” and all things Shel Silverstein (he still reads them when he can). Tex learned stuff at the university of Texas and, most recently, at the Portfolio Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Now he spends his days drawing & painting his own pictures from his Atlanta-based studio.
To see his more of his work, take a little trip to his website or check out the “illustration” section of his blog.