After roughly establishing when and how often newspapers mentioned Coca-Cola, we turned to full-text searching to assemble a sub-corpus of Coca-Cola advertisements. We used the text mining tool Texcavator to query the digitized newspaper corpus. This tool was developed as part of the research project Translantis [Eijnatten et al. 2014] [Eijnatten et al. 2013] [Huijnen et al. 2012]. Using this tool, we filtered results based on metadata such as article type (advertisement, article, personal announcement, and captioned illustration), newspaper type (regional, colonial, and national), periodization, and newspaper title. Furthermore, we used wildcards, Boolean operators, and fuzzy matching to improve the relevant number of hits associated with a query [Blaxill 2013, 328–30]. As such, full-text searching enabled a more extensive and advanced way of mapping the corpus than the n-gram viewer was able to do.[6]

The first step in locating Coca-Cola advertisements involved determining whether Coca-Cola actually advertised in Dutch national and regional newspapers. Searching for “Coca-Cola” yielded numerous advertisements. These were not only advertisements for Coca-Cola, but also for the soft drink brands Fanta and Sprite. The Coca-Cola Company also produced these drinks and was therefore mentioned.[7] Since we were only interested in the role of Coca-Cola, we excluded these by altering our search query.[8] We relied on probes of close reading to improve our search query, which corroborates the interdependence between close and distant reading.

The refined search query found 2,905 advertisements in regional and national newspapers published between 1890 and 1990. In the same period, 4,517 advertisements contained “Cola” without mentioning “Coca-Cola”.[9] This demonstrates that Coca-Cola advertisements formed a large portion (39.1%) of the advertisements for Cola beverages.[10] Advertisements for Coca-Cola (n = 2,905) and Cola drinks — both Coca-Cola and other brands — (n = 7,422) formed only a small portion of all the digitized newspaper advertisements (n = 18,645,511); only 0,016% contained “Coca-Cola” and 0,040% “Cola”. This shows that Coca-Cola was the most dominant Cola brand, but in relation to the overall advertising corpus the ads for Coca-Cola formed a relatively small portion.

The timelines in Figure 5 show the absolute and relative annual frequency of Coca-Cola advertisements.[11] In order to compare the proportion — and thus significance — of Coca-Cola advertisements between periods, we normalized the absolute frequency of Coca-Cola to the total number of advertisements in the corpus. These timelines show that the first advertisements appeared during the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam when the Coca-Cola Company launched the beverage in the Netherlands [Zwaal 1993, 72–73].[12] Figure 5 also demonstrates that after 1929 the number of Coca-Cola advertisements dwindled, and started to grow again around 1950. From the 1960s onwards, the relative number of Coca-Cola advertised stayed relatively stable (green line) while the absolute number of advertisements (blue line) mushroomed. These peaks in absolute frequency correlate with a general increase of advertisements in the digitized newspaper corpus, which rose from 163,666 in 1960 to 275,585 advertisements in 1980. After normalization, these peaks slimmed down and suggest that the proportion of Coca-Cola advertisements within the total corpus of advertisement did not change substantially.

Contextualizing these results by close reading shows that the majority of advertisements in the 1970s consisted of job ads by the Coca-Cola Company or advertisements authored by others, such as supermarket chains.[13] Even though this is an interesting find, the focus here is on how the Coca-Cola Company advertised Coca-Cola. Close readings of advertisements in the other periods exhibited that the majority of advertisements in the sub-corpus were indeed advertisements by the Coca-Cola Company. For this reason, the following analysis will focus on a sub-corpus of Coca-Cola advertisements published between 1928 and 1970. In the next workflow, we show how we analyzed this sub-corpus of Coca-Cola advertisements.

We looked at the co-occurrence of references to the United States and Coca-Cola to determine whether the Coca-Cola Company related its leading drink to the United States. When calculating the frequency of these co-occurrences, we used context words and a context horizon — two functionalities offered by AntConc. Context words are words that must appear within a set distance — a context horizon — to the search word. We set this distance to ten words to the right and ten to the left of a search word. In our case the context words included different ways of referring to the United States as expressed by the search query: “coca?cola”.[14]

We used context words and a context horizon for two reasons. First, the OCR software did not always correctly compartmentalize the advertisements in the newspaper corpus during digitization. Especially in the case of classified ads, the software grouped multiple ads as one single advertisement [Verhoef 2015b]. There are instances where “Coca-Cola” and “America” appeared in the actual newspapers in two separate advertisements, whereas after digitization, they were indexed as one single advertisement. A context horizon required the search word and the context words to be in close proximity, which reduced faulty results produced by composite advertisements in which the search word and context words would often be further apart.

Secondly, the co-occurrence of two words does not necessarily indicate a relationship between them; it merely suggests the possibility of a relationship. By setting a context horizon, we only looked for references to America in the proximity of “Coca-Cola”. The proximity we selected is a good indicator of a semantic relationship between words [Tognini-Bonelli 2001, 101].

Using the context words and the context horizon, AntConc yielded not a single document in which Coca-Cola and a reference to the United States co-occurred. As this was an unanticipated result, we established whether “coca-cola” co-occurred with “america” in advertisements without being in each other’s proximity. This was the case in fifty-one advertisements. We did a close reading of these advertisements, which corroborated that the Coca-Cola Company did not explicitly advertise Coca-Cola as an American product. It also confirmed that most of the co-occurrences resulted from grouped advertisements, or from advertisements in which the words were unrelated. This verified the advantages of setting a context horizon and using context words.

A full-text search for the phrase “American Cola” in the entire corpus of advertisements produced sixty-six results.[15] Close examination of these articles showed that from 1964 onwards, retailers and producers other than the Coca-Cola Company occasionally presented Colas as American cola. For instance, the American brand Royal Crown specifically branded its drinks as “real American Cola.”[16] This shows that other brands explicitly promoted their Cola as American, while the Coca-Cola Company refused to explicitly present its cola as an American cola.

Overall, searching for co-occurrences offered an inkling of possible trends in the corpus, in this case that the Coca-Cola Company did not explicitly associate Coca-Cola with America or the United States. Moreover, these searches also ruled out that advertisers used the phrase “the American way of life.” If Coca-Cola advertisements depicted an American way of life, or referred to the United States, they did so in implicit terms or through visual content.

In the next step of the analysis, we examined whether Coca-Cola advertisements included themes that might symbolize an American way of life. For this purpose, we used AntConc’s clustering, concordancing, collocation, and word frequency functionalities. We used clustering to detect common phrases that contain specific keywords. Collocation was used to look for words that co-occurred within a specified context horizon [Sinclair et al. 2004, 10]. We looked for collocates within a window span of five words to the left and five to the right, and a minimum collocate frequency of ten. We did not use the MI-score that is able to calculate the strength of the collocation as it is not very useful for analyzing advertisements, since these tend to be relatively short. AntConc’s concordancing option allowed us to quickly determine the context in which the discovered words and phrases appeared. Moreover, we turned to the word frequency functionality for a list of all the words and their frequencies within the corpus.

In order to keep track of possible changes within advertising discourse, we divided the sub-corpus of Coca-Cola advertisements into four ten-year periods: 1928-1937 (n = 220), 1938-1947 (n = 53), 1948-1957 (n = 372), and 1958-1967 (n = 414). Collocation analysis demonstrated that the relatively small set of advertisements between 1938 and 1947 contained no collocates that were of historical relevance. Therefore, our analysis focused on 1928-1937, 1948-1957, and 1958-1967.[17]

From the list of collocates from all three periods, we discerned two themes: the drink’s international and local connotation of the drink, and Coca-Cola’s refreshing and invigorating taste.

The first element in Coca-Cola advertisement was the international character of the drink, as expressed by the following words: “world”, “countries”, and “international”.[18] Advertisements in the interwar period put more emphasis on this theme, as evinced by the higher relative frequency of these words in this period. Figure 6 shows how the international aspect of Coca-Cola appeared during its introduction in the Netherlands in 1928 and 1929, and then virtually disappeared from advertisements until the 1950s. When the drink re-appeared in the 1950s the international aspect more clearly was part of Coca-Cola’s brand identity. As early as 1929, one advertisement read: “Coca-Cola quickly conquered the entire world. In Europe, Coca-Cola is the most beloved drink in all the trendsetting places.”[19] After 1929, the connotation to the brand’s global popularity seems to have disappeared from advertisements. It is important to keep in mind that the number of advertisements between 1930 and 1950 was relatively low, which explains why references to the drink’s international character might not have been found through querying. In the 1950s — when the corpus also contains a sizeable number of ads — internationalism re-emerged as part of Coca-Cola’s brand identity. Throughout the 1950s advertisements continued to highlight the global character of the drink.[20] Advertisers repeatedly mentioned the number of countries and continents in which the Coca-Cola Company sold the drink.[21] This number increased from seventy-eight in 1929, to more than a hundred countries in 1959.[22] The emphasis in ads on this increase helped to establish the idea with Dutch consumers that the global popularity of Coca-Cola was growing.

In addition to the drink’s global character, advertisers tied the drink to the Netherlands. They did so by mentioning the Dutch bottling companies in advertisements. Words such as “bottler,” “to bottle,” “Amsterdam,” “Schiedam,” “Scheveningen,” and “local” situated Coca-Cola within a local context.[23] After the Second World War, the Coca-Cola Company allowed local Dutch bottling plants to import Coca-Cola’s trademarked syrup, which bottlers mixed with local mineral water [Zwaal 1993, 145–49]. The names of towns that housed the bottling plants appeared in small print at the bottom of advertisements. The appearance of their names in these ads connected Coca-Cola to particular Dutch places.[24] Advertisers further emphasized the “local” nature of franchises when they claimed that “everywhere bottling and distribution of Coca-Cola is a local enterprise.”[25] In 1955, De Tijd wrote that “the Coke bottle is not only known all over the world, it is also of local importance,” which further underlines the entanglement of the global and local.[26]

Advertisers not only mentioned the locations of bottling plants, they also linked Coca-Cola to Dutch towns, such as Scheveningen, Amsterdam, and Leeuwarden. In 1928, the regional newspaper Leeuwarder Courant wrote that after its global success, Dutch consumers could now also buy a Coke in Leeuwarden.[27] After opening a new factory in Amsterdam in 1961, an ad in De Telegraaf announced that “Amsterdam and Coca-Cola belonged together!”[28] These ads illustrate how Coca-Cola symbolized the entwinement of the global with the local. The association between the global and the local is what Roland Robertson labels “glocalization”, the interplay between local developments and currents of globalization [Robertson 1995]. Advertisements presented Coca-Cola as a global, international brand somewhat tailored to the local context.

The Coca-Cola Company acquainted many Dutch consumers in the 1950s and 1960s with a product with a glocal brand identity, which made glocalization one of the ideas that traveled alongside with Coca-Cola to the Netherlands. Perhaps the glocalizing ability of American brands, such as Coca-Cola, explains why in the eyes of scholars and consumers Americanization became a code word for globalization [Oldenziel 2007, 84] [Muthyala 2012]. The Coca-Cola Company did not explicitly relate Coca-Cola to the United States in advertisements. However, the references to the drink’s glocal character can be read as uniquely American. Ruth Oldenziel alludes to this particular feature by describing America as having the “uncanny ability (…) to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time: omnipresent globally, but territorially deterritorialized”  [Oldenziel 2007, 87]. The link to the United States was thus not so much an explicit geographical reference, but rather a more implicit connection to symbolisms and affects associated with the United States. The glocalizing ability of prominent American brands such as Coca-Cola also explains how consumers equated the process of Americanization with globalization.

The second theme that dominated Coca-Cola advertisements was its taste. This became most explicit in advertisements published between 1928-1937 and 1958-1967.

In the interwar period, advertisements described Coca-Cola’s taste as “fine”, “delicious” and “distinct”.[29] Other frequent characteristics of the drink included: refreshing, bubbling, and invigorating.[30] Soft drinks contained bubbles that produced a tactile sensation, which advertisers connected to refreshment. This link was expressed in the following slogans: “Coca-Cola bubbles in your glass,” “Coca-Cola is deliciously refreshing,” and “Coca-Cola’s fizzes and bubbles.”[31]

Overall, the description of Coca-Cola’s taste did not seem to change drastically between the two periods. Not surprisingly, in both periods the Coca-Cola Company presented their product as delicious and one of a kind. There was, however, another striking characteristic associated with Coca-Cola’s taste: its ability to refresh and invigorate. In the period 1958-1967, “invigorating” collocated significantly to “Coca-Cola” and “taste”.[32] Furthermore, the relative frequency of words denoting invigoration accrued in this period, which substantiates a discursive shift in the Coca-Cola Company’s branding strategy. The ads linked the drink’s refreshing bubbles to invigoration: “how invigorating that tingling sparkle.”[33]

In addition to the drink’s ability to stimulate the consumer, the Coca-Cola Company claimed the drink could — rather paradoxically — also relax the consumer. In one of the first Coca-Cola advertisements in Dutch newspapers, Coca-Cola was associated with leisure time.[34] This theme continued to pop up throughout the years. In 1954, for instance, an advert claimed that the beverage would provide “rest, relaxation, and new energy.”[35]

By focusing on relaxation, the advertisements also highlighted its counterpart: stress. The advertisements chiefly situated stress within the context of people at work in the office or homemakers doing their chores. Figure 7 shows how advertisements instructed consumers to “stop rushing for a minute! Your nerves will quiet down and all tension will disappear.”[36]

Moreover, Coca-Cola advertisements informed Dutch consumers that stress and relaxation were part of a modern lifestyle. The Coca-Cola Company claimed that the drink’s ability to stimulate led to its popularity and turned it into a “drink cherished by modern people.”[37] The modern businessman and homemaker drank a refreshing bottle of coke during breaks to alleviate stress. This association between products and an urban and modern lifestyle, Marchand shows, blossomed in the United States in the 1930s in cigarette advertisements [Marchand 1985, 337]. Our results show that the Coca-Cola Company actively sought to evoke similar depictions of such a lifestyle, in which consumption was an integral to being a modern consumer.

Another distinctive element of the modern consumer was that both males and female could drink Coca-Cola whenever and with whomever.[38] Moreover, ads explicitly pointed out that the “sparkling refreshment” and “unchanging quality” caused people of all ages and in all settings to consume the drink.[39] Phrases such as “during work”, “during dinner”, “during sports and play”, and “drank by young and old” demonstrate that the Coca-Cola Company set out to make the drink accessible for everyone.[40] Ads for Coca-Cola presented Dutch consumer with a vision of a modern consumer society in which everybody could imbibe the same consumer goods.

This image is what scholars such as Richard Pells, T. Jackson Lears, and Charles McGovern describe as an American way of life. Additionally, Victoria de Grazia argues that many American products available in Europe focused on the democratization of consumer goods [Grazia 2005, 217]. Our analysis shows that Coca-Cola advertisements in the Netherlands also emphasized this aspect.

By means of advertisements, the Coca-Cola Company injected specific elements into the Dutch public consciousness that shaped how the Dutch viewed the American way of life. These elements also resonated within Dutch advertising discourse for other American products, such as cigarettes [Wevers 2017]. This commonality between different kinds of American consumer goods strengthened Coca-Cola’s function as an icon of the American way of life. Further research into different consumer goods is needed to see how they collaboratively contributed to the Dutch perception of the American way of life, or America in general.