At the beginning of 2014, with debates raging in America on everything from immigration reform to marriage equality, Coca-Cola – a quintessential American brand dedicated to making culturally relevant statements like “Hilltop” and “Mean Joe Greene” – decided it was time to start another cultural conversation. This time about what truly makes America beautiful.

This campaign took an iconic traditional anthem, “America the Beautiful,” and reinterpreted it into a multilingual contemporary film that conveys the cultural diversity that makes America so beautiful. Right now. Today. And invited America to have a public and passionate debate via social about what they think makes America beautiful.

And boy did they.

Unlike most audio where the music is supportive to the creative, in this instance the music track was the core creative idea. Our challenge was to take something that was a well-known anthem and completely rearrange and reimagine it in a way that made you hear it in a completely new and revelatory way. The music track featured in the commercial was based on a completely new arrangement of a traditional American poem and public domain song, “America the Beautiful.” A brand-new arrangement with piano and strings was composed especially for the campaign, and the lyrics were translated into nine separate languages and sung by nine bilingual American girls. The translation had to not only be sympathetic to the spirit of the lyrics but work rhythmically with the newly arranged version. It was a complicated and time-consuming but rewarding process.

Both in public broadcast and social media the campaign dominated the Super Bowl and post-Super Bowl conversation. It sparked a national debate about diversity in America and put the brand and the core values of equality and unity front and center. Positive sentiment outweighed negative sentiment by 9 to 1. It quickly became the most talked-about campaign in Coca-Cola’s history. It put a soft drink company in the forefront of a conversation about national identity and national pride. It made a few people boycott the brand; it made many others swear an oath to never drink any other soda. Simply put, it didn’t make the news — it was the news.

200 million media impressions

1,400 print, broadcast, and online media stories including Colbert Report, Jon Stewart Show, New York Times, New Yorker, NPR, BBC

Over 17 million views on YouTube

3 million impressions for America’s Selfie