[msb-alumni] Bill Backer, Who Taught the World (and Don Draper) to Sing, Dies at 89

From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 21 May 2016 12:30:23 -0400

BlankBill Backer, Who Taught the World (and Don Draper) to Sing, Dies at 89

By
SAM ROBERTS
MAY 16, 2016

Photo Bill Backer, who worked an advertising executive in the so-called “golden
age of advertising,” at his horse farm and home in The Plains, Va. last year.
He created the 1971 Coca-Cola “Hilltop” commercial with the jingle “I’d Like to
Buy the World a Coke.”  Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

Bill Backer, a lapsed lyricist whose
classic 1971 commercial  taught a fractious world of potential
Coca-Cola  consumers to sing in perfect harmony and was featured in the
finale of “Mad Men,”  died on Friday in Warrenton, Va. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by his wife and only immediate survivor, the former Ann
Mudge.

Mr. Backer and his team immortalized jingles and slogans that proclaimed
“Things
go better with Coke” and defined the soft drink as “the real thing”; declared
that Miller Lite was “everything you ever wanted in a beer… and less”; elevated
the Campbell’s brand by asserting that “soup is good food”; and allowed
that “little girls have pretty curls, but I like Oreo.”

He also anointed the break devoted to beer drinking as “Miller Time,” reserved
festive occasions for Löwenbräu (“Here’s to good friends, tonight is kind of
special”), and created advertising campaigns for Fisher-Price, Hyundai cars,
Parliament cigarettes, Philip Morris, Quaker Foods and Xerox.

But Mr. Backer had no illusions about what collaboration he would be remembered
for, as he told The New York Times in 1993 when he was about to retire
as vice chairman and worldwide creative director of Backer Spielvogel Bates
after a four-decade career in advertising.

“Nobody out there has heard of J. Walter Thompson or Backer Spielvogel Bates,”
he said. “Those are temporal, self-aggrandizing entities. But if you come
up with what’s basically a little hymn to getting the world together, it’s a
contribution.”

His little hymn, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony),”
became a memorable commercial for Coca-Cola, a hit record, the inspiration
for a sequel Super Bowl advertisement in 1991 and a coda for “Mad Men” on AMC
last year.

In the scene, it is the advertising executive Don Draper, the series’
protagonist, while meditating at a spiritual retreat in California, who conjures
up the original commercial, with its utopian vision of apple trees and
honeybees
and snow white turtledoves and a youthful multicultural chorus singing
from an Italian hilltop about how they’d like “to buy the world a Coke and keep
it company.”

group start media
Photo
A still from the hilltop Coca-Cola commercial.  Credit The Coca-Cola Company
group end

Matthew Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men,” was quoted as describing the series
finale as “a love letter for a brand.”

Mr. Backer’s own epiphany behind what became known as the hilltop commercial
was
not quite as blissful.

According to his account in
a company-sponsored video,
he was on his way to London in January 1971 to meet with the songwriters Billy
Davis and Roger Cook when his flight was diverted by fog to Shannon Airport in
Ireland.

The next morning, Mr. Backer was stunned to see the diverse group of passengers
who had been angry the night before cheerfully conversing in the coffee
shop.

“People from all over the world, forced by circumstance, were having a Coke —
or
a cup of coffee or tea — together,” he wrote in his 1993 book, “The Care
and Feeding of Ideas.” “They were making eye contact over a Coke, and they were
keeping each other company.”

I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke Commercial - 1971 - YouTube frame
I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke Commercial - 1971

Watch I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke Commercial - 1971
I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke Commercial - 1971 - YouTube frame end
I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke Commercial - 1971 Video by CokeConversations

He added, “That was the basic idea: to see Coke not as it was originally
designed to be — a liquid refresher — but as a tiny bit of commonality between
all peoples.”

By the time he flew to Liverpool and was bused to fog-shrouded London, he
recalled: “I could see and hear a song that treated the whole world as if it
were a person — a person the singer would like to help and get to know. I’m not
sure how the lyric should start, but I know the last line.”

On a paper napkin, he had scribbled, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep
it company.”

The three songwriters concurred on the lyrics, and the vocal group the New
Seekers recorded it for radio (adapting the tune from a song by Mr. Cook and
Roger Greenaway).

Coca-Cola’s president deemed it too sappy. Coke bottlers hated it. So Mr.
Backer
persuaded the company to try a video version instead. Harvey Gabor, a
young art director, envisioned a diverse chorus in native outfits lip-syncing.
A
near-record $250,000 was approved for production.

A cast was rehearsed at the white cliffs of Dover, but after a three-day
downpour, production was shifted to a hillside outside Rome. At first, hundreds
of impatient and parched schoolchildren unharmoniously stampeded to grab free
bottles of soda. A new cast was finally recruited, the commercial became
a success, and recordings by both the New Seekers and the Hillside Singers
(with
the reference to Coke removed) hit the Billboard charts.

The commercial succeeded, Mr. Backer told Slate in 2014, because “it’s not
phony.”

“The product itself is a product that brings people together,” he said. “It was
a simple observation of the product performing one of the functions it
does so well: It’s a social catalyst.”

William Montague Backer was born in Manhattan on June 9, 1926, to William
Bryant
Backer, a real estate developer, and the former Ferdinanda Legare. His
father died when he was 6, and he moved with his mother to her native South
Carolina.

He wrote musical comedies in high school, served in the Navy and graduated from
Yale in 1950. He hoped to become a songwriter but was persuaded by his
mother and stepfather, Dr. Joseph I. Waring, to go into a more legitimate
business, like real estate, which he did briefly.

He then started a jingle business before leaving for Columbia Pictures, but was
so critical of the commercials being produced there that he was fired.
His boss suggested an ad agency.

In 1953, he went to work in the mailroom at
McCann
Erickson.  He was named creative director in 1972 and vice chairman in 1978. A
year later, he and Carl Spielvogel, a former advertising columnist for The
Times
and
an executive at McCann’s owner,  Interpublic,
formed their own agency.

By 1984, Backer & Spielvogel was billing more than $400 million a year. In
1986,
it was bought by the British company Saatchi & Saatchi for a reported
down payment of $56 million, with $45 million more paid over six years, and
merged with Ted Bates Worldwide.

After Mr. Backer retired, he moved to Virginia, where he owned a thoroughbred
horse farm and was president of the
Piedmont Foundation, which supports land conservation.

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[msb-alumni] Bill Backer, Who Taught the World (and Don Draper) to Sing, Dies at 89

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