Celadon Icon Coming Soon to the High

Ranking the world's most recognized logos or icons, few are on par with the Olympic rings.

And when it comes to most recognized brands, Coca-Cola is also tough to beat.

Coke is also known for famous product packages -- starting with the "contour bottle" -- and the South's leading art museum is preparing to host an exhibition in celebration of the container's 100th anniversary.

As noted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and via museum press materials, the exhibition “The Coca-Cola Bottle: An American Icon at 100” will open Feb. 28.

It's all happening in the home town of the Atlanta-based beverage giant, in the galleries of the High Museum of Art (a client).

Since its inception in 1915, the Coca-Cola “contour bottle” became one of the world's most recognized icons. Originally designed by a team at the Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Ind., the bottle emerged as a distinct package for an already ubiquitous product launched in 1886.

The design was the result of a competition challenging bottle manufacturers to develop a container recognizable even if broken or touched in the dark.

The winning design’s curves and celadon-tinted glass ultimately had an outstanding impact on 20th-century visual art and culture (the term "bottle green" eventually followed in the realm of color nomenclature). 

The exhibition features over 100 objects, including more than 15 works by Andy Warhol and dozens

of photographs inspired by or featuring the bottle. The items will be arranged in sections by history, photography and pop art (no pun intended).

When I first learned of this exhibition, it intrigued me given its overlap with the World of Coca-Cola's year-long exhibition of Howard Finster folk art works featuring, inspired by or painted on actual contour bottles of varying size.

It also surprised me the High is not including its own Finster/Coke item (a hand-painted, oversized contour bottle) from the museum's permanent collection in the exhibition. But then, Finster's painted items don't fit the trio of exhibition sections.

Another permanent collection item -- a vintage magazine illustration (ad) featuring a couple with two six-bottle cartons -- also remains behind-the-scenes, as does a 1974 bottle-free Elliott Erwitt image of a Coke vending machine positioned with several rockets.

Only time will tell whether the High will mount the permanent collection Coke items in tandem with "An American Icon at 100" (I hope they do).

Briefly getting back to the Olympic rings, their creator -- modern Olympic founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin -- first sketched and hand-colored the design in 1913 and 1914 as a single row of intertwined circles, just a year or two ahead of the guys in Indiana embarking on their bottle contest entry.

Whether de Coubertin was inspired by five pre-contour bottle condensation rings (on his desk or table as he sipped a Coke while sketching) is one iconic backstory we may never know.

Images via the High Museum of Art. Image credits:

-- nendo (Japanese, founded Tokyo, 2002) Bottleware, 2012. Photo c. The Coca-Cola Company. Diagram courtesy of nendo
-- Jan Saudek (Czech, born 1935), Broken Bottle, 1973. Collection of Joyce Linker. c. Jan Saudek
-- Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987), Three Coke Bottles, 1962, silkscreen, ink and graphite on linen, The Andy  Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, Inc., 1998.1.20 c. 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists

Running Across Russia

Just the other day, organizers unveiled the massive route for the Sochi 2014 Olympic Torch Relay. It's impressive. By the numbers:

• Begins Oct. 7, 2013
• On the road 123 days
• Visiting 2,900 communities
• 14,000 torchbearers
• 65,000 km
• Within a one-hour drive of 130 million potential spectators (90 percent of Russian residents)
• 30,000 volunteers
• Three partners: Coca-Cola, Ingosstrakh Insurance Company and JSC Russian Railways Co.
• This is Coke's ninth Olympic torch relay as presenting sponsor
• According to published reports north of the border, the international space station is one stop on the 2014 Olympic torch relay route.

No word yet on the selection criteria to carry the Olympic torch, but I anticipate nomination process details will be unveiled very soon. Where will you be watching the 2014 Olympic flame?

Photo via Ivan Sekretarev/Associated Press

Coke Is It!

For one of my early posts, the topic of The Coca-Cola Company and its longstanding support of the Olympic Movement was briefly detailed. In the months since that post, several new Coca-Cola Olympic experiences came into view both in Beijing and stateside.

It came as no surprise, Coke's pavilion on the Olympic Green was magnificent. Luck and timing took me to the site on three occasions during the Games.

First, our crew for B.C. Canada Pavilion visited Coke Olympic Central with the Premier of British Columbia (a VIP guest early during the Games). This afforded a few of us the opportunity to pose with a Beijing Olympic Torch at a photo- or postcard-ready window looking out to the Bird's Nest.

A few nights later, en route to retrieve photos taken on site (a generous gift for visitors to that makeshift photo-opp-spot), I ran into several Atlanta-based reporters in China to cover the Games, including Jennifer Brett from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a crew from WXIA-TV, Atlanta's NBC affiliate. They were wrapping up reports from a Coke-hosted evening media event at which I learned about a special film project of Coca-Cola.

I was also slated to visit the Coke pavilion -- which will become a new World of Coca-Cola Museum for China (like the original in Atlanta) -- for a media event involving VIP Olympic Family members chosen for a special award presented to them by Coca-Cola (unfortunately, my arrival was late due to taxi snafu, but the venue staff gave me a refreshing beverage in spite of my tardiness). Of all the grand pavilions on the Olympic Green, the Coca-Cola experience was in the tops list (right up there with GE and Johnson & Johnson, two clients of the p.r. firm where I work).

Back in Atlanta a few weeks ago, The Coca-Cola Company's senior manager of marketing communications, Petro, shared the stage with other Olympic sponsor representatives at the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Georgia Chapter luncheon on Olympic P.R. His presentation filled in a few blanks on how Coca-Cola executed some of their highly visible Olympic activities -- such as the Torch Relay and pin trading centers -- before and during the Beijing experience. We learned the company brought several employees to Beijing, and in spite of many challenges they apparently generated gazillions of media "hits" that were 96 percent positive. I was glad to learn of their commitment to the Games extended to at least 2020.

Coke also hosted a recent photo opp at the Atlanta World of Coca-Cola destination during which IOC Member and pole vaulting gold medalist Sergey Bubka joined Coke's archivist to install an official Beijing Torch into their vast collection of Olympic memorabilia (thanks, Petro, for the photo with this post).

All this Coke Olympic activity serves as a reminder of one of my earliest exposures to the public relations industry.

During the summer of 1993, while volunteering at the U.S. Olympic Festival in San Antonio, Texas, I spent two of the hottest summer weeks ever as a driver on the Festival's Texas Torch Relay around the city. On our last day of the relay, the crew chief assigned the primo driving assignment -- lead car ... a convertible -- as the team hosted three VIP guests from The Coca-Cola Company who were visiting as observers of the Torch Relay process (and more specifically how media were part of this Olympic Movement public relations tradition started in 1936).

Spending the day visiting with those Coke P.R. executives in the car convinced me to take a closer look at the P.R. track at college (to that point, I was undecided between newspaper journalism and P.R. -- thanks, Joan, Carlton and the other guest whose name escapes me while typing this post). And many of the elements they observed later became part of Coke's participation in the 1996 Olympic Torch Relay from L.A. to Atlanta.

I'll be sure to keep drinking in Coke's many Olympic touch points -- can hardly wait to see what they unfold for Vancouver, London, Sochi and beyond.

Rings Go Better With Coke!

For 80 years, The Coca-Cola Company has been a sponsor or supplier of the Olympics. Today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution includes a feature on Big Red's activation plans for Beijing, and even delves into their future work for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver.

My earliest Olympic soda memory dates back to the summer of 1984. The cross-country Olympic Torch Relay passed through my hometown of Edmond, Okla., and a few weeks later the Opening Ceremonies broadcast from L.A. was narrated by Jim McKay on ABC (with the greatest card trick of all time). And sometime that summer we discovered that Coke was marketing its Olympic participation with special 12 oz. glass bottles on which Sam The Olympic Eagle mascot was waving -- I think one of those bottles went on to become our family's "last 'original formula' bottle" until New Coke came and went away a couple of years later.

The big soda company also took Olympic pin collecting to a new plateau at the Winter Games in Calgary, Canada, in 1988, with what I understand was their first Olympic Pin Trading tent (a program replicated at most, if not all, of the Games since). They even had "Coke Olympic City" in downtown Atlanta in 1996 (now site of the new World of Check-Out-Our-120-Years-of-Advertising Museum beside the Georgia Aquarium).

I don't play favorites when it comes to soda -- most major, and sometimes regional, brands are often inside my refrigerator (at this very moment I'm drinking a delicious cola with a five-letter name that starts with "P" and sort-of rhymes with "Dizzy Gillespie" -- a client of the firm where I work) . If someone could just come up with official Olympic root beer (like this one), I'd be set.