The "Hilltop Ad"

In yesterday's post I linked Coca Cola to an ad the company ran in July, 1971. Known as the "Hilltop Ad", it features a crowd of teenagers, dressed in clothes that signify where in the world they are from, gathered atop a hill in Italy and lip-synching to a song co-written by the advertising company Coca Cola had hired to accelerate sales of its brown drink. This one-minute song proved so popular amongst Americans that radio stations were besieged with requests to "play the ad."

I remember seeing the "Hilltop Ad" as a nine-year-old. And though I too was drawn to it, I could never understand why, when the camera pulls back to show those gathered, they are not in the shape of the world, only a third of it. Years later my mother, who used to sing this ad to us on car rides, told me that it was not the incomplete world-shape people talked about back then, but that it looked like the place from which babies are born.