Coca-Cola
Yeah Yeah Yeah La La La
Mother
‘The brief was that Coke was looking for a big campaign for the summer. A campaign to launch summer for teenagers.’ According to Thierry Albert, a creative at Mother ad agency in London, this is how Coke’s unusual ad, Yeah Yeah Yeah La La La, began. The 2009 ad started with the tagline, which came from the mind of another Mother creative, Rob Doubal, who worked on the campaign alongside Albert and Damien Bellon. ‘We were all working on a Coke summer campaign when our friend Rob Doubal came up with this weird sentence,’ explains Albert. ‘From there, Damien and I thought that an instrument and some weird creatures would be the best way to spread those beautiful but weird words into the world.’
‘The brief was that Coke was looking for a big campaign for the summer. A campaign to launch summer for teenagers.’
01-06 The Yeah Yeah Yeah La La La campaign for Coke featured a brightly coloured organ (shown centre) that contained a band of unusual-looking but highly tuneful creatures. Shown here are photographs from the making of the creatures and from the shoot for the ad, which took place in New Zealand.
07 Mother creative Thierry Albert pictured alongside one of the Coke creatures.
‘We wrote this story about an organ player who has built a strange instrument with bits of a Hammond organ and bobs of computers,’ continues Albert, ‘and who uses it to feed creatures with Coke so they can sing.’ Albert and Bellon turned to director Dougal Wilson to help them design the set and the creatures for the bizarre spot. ‘We always wanted to work with Dougal as we have always admired his work,’ says Albert. ‘We were waiting for the right project and this one seemed to be perfect, because it’s close to a music video – Dougal is one of the best promo directors around – and it has crazy creatures in it, and some animation as well. It also needed a great attention to detail and crafting and Dougal is a perfectionist.’
Mother approached Wilson with an illustration to help explain the strange idea for the ad, which featured an ancient ‘kitten-organ’, a musical instrument containing real cats, who would yowl when different keys were played. ‘They’d found this illustration,’ explains Wilson, ‘an old, old picture that is on Wikipedia. Apparently there was a physician in a royal court – I’m not sure which century it was – where the king was suffering from some sort of mental malaise, so he devised this kitten-organ, which he thought would rouse him from this catatonic state, because there’s no way you could ignore that.’
Work on devising the creatures and the organ that they would be placed within began, with no avenue left unexplored in the search for exactly the right look for the ad. ‘Damien, the art director, was pretty full on with the amount of reference material for the organ that he gave me,’ says Wilson. ‘I love old synths and organs, so that was one side of the research, finding all that, and then the other side was looking at the creatures. We looked at all sorts of things like cats and monkeys, but the one that seemed most relevant was a sloth, a baby sloth.’ Initially Wilson felt that all the creatures should be the same. ‘I wanted to approach it super-logically and make all these creatures identical, but in different sizes, to represent different notes, like pipes on an organ,’ he says. ‘So a fat one would make a low note, and a little one would make a high note. They were adamant that they should all be random and different sizes – they wanted it to be less logical, more creative. They were right, because it would have been pretty boring if they were all the same.’
‘We were specific in the storyboard, but a story like this is quite a complicated thing to communicate.… I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in so much detail, but at the same time it still felt quite chaotic while we were shooting it.’
Wilson did introduce a second group of creatures to the spot, however – a band that is revealed halfway through. ‘I thought it would be good to have a different chapter halfway through the ad,’ he says, ‘which also reveals where the music is coming from. So down below there’s a second tier of doors, which open up revealing these dudes. And it gives you another gag.’
08-09 Early drawings and designs for the creatures and the organ. The organ features a bottle that distributes Coke to the creatures, encouraging them to sing.
The music was a central element to the ad, with part of the brief from Coke being an ambitious request to create an ‘anthem of the summer’ via the spot. The team commissioned a number of demos from musicians, all of whom devised a song around the words of the ad, ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah La La La’. Calvin Harris’s version was eventually chosen, and a 12-inch single of his track was released as the ad launched.
While this song was being prepared, the creatives were occupied in constructing individual personalities for each of the creatures, to help define how they would behave. Among the singers are Nufsaid, described by Albert as ‘the one who never says anything. He likes to watch the clouds and chew on cherry stones’; Samson: ‘He doesn’t like his nickname, but with curly eyebrows like that, what else was he expecting?’; Crétin: ‘He used to be called Stupid but didn’t like it so the others changed it to Crétin – stupid in French – and now he’s very happy with it’; and Lick, who ‘has the biggest tongue you have ever seen, which gives him an unbelievable sense of rhythm. He could make a herd of cows tap dance.’
Casting for an actor to play the organist in the spot was similarly rigorous: ‘He had to feel like he had a big story behind him, he had to feel a bit dubious and like he’d been to a lot of places,’ says Wilson of the figure they wanted to present.
‘He wasn’t the smartest character in terms of his appearance, but he looked quite wise – a bit of a vagabond I suppose, a travelling salesman type, wheeling his organ from town to town. Slightly Pied Piper-esque – a bit of a mythic character who just pops up in places and hands out Coke! If he were too clean-shaven and good-looking and nice, it would end up looking very, very cheesy. We were desperate to try and keep him looking a bit rough and swarthy.’
10 Pages from director Dougal Wilson’s sketchbook that was filled with ideas and imagery during the development of the ad.
11 Dougal Wilson’s hand-drawn storyboards for the spot reveal a detailed plan for the variety of shots he needed to complete during the shoot in New Zealand.
12 Still images taken from the completed ad.
13 A limited edition 12” record of Calvin Harris’s soundtrack for the ad, which was released to coincide with the launch of the campaign. One of the creatures from the ad stars on the picture disc.
14 Further pages from Wilson’s sketchbook, showing the detailed development of the organ that was featured in the spot.
Despite this meticulous preparation, the shoot itself was not without its difficulties. The combination of detailed puppeteering with wider shots showing people dancing to the music proved especially tricky. ‘It’s dealing with things that are very, very small and fiddly,’ Wilson says, ‘but then also shots that are very wide and have a lot of scale to them. So it was an exhausting shoot.’ The film was shot over eight days in New Zealand, on a piece of Maori land featuring a large hill, which in itself created problems, due to strong winds. ‘Often we took the organ down to the bottom of the hill and just shot close-up stuff there, because you wouldn’t be able to tell where it was,’ continues Wilson. ‘It was quite gruelling because somehow we were always short on time – we often are on my shoots because I try to get a lot of shots in so I have the option in the edit. We were specific in the storyboard, but a story like this is quite a complicated thing to communicate.… I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in so much detail, but at the same time it still felt quite chaotic while we were shooting it.’
Other, far more unexpected moments, also occurred. ‘A funny/scary moment was when a cow broke its leg on the hill close to where we were shooting,’ says Albert. ‘It was wandering around, it had nothing to do with us… but two officials came around, shot it and decided to carve it up in front of everybody, just before lunch.’
In spite of these complications, with Yeah Yeah Yeah La La La, Mother and Wilson created one of the most surreal and imaginative ads ever made for Coke. There are references to previous ads for the brand within it – the iconic 1970s spot where teenagers assemble on a sundrenched hilltop in Italy comes to mind – but the film emits a quirky, individual style that ultimately feels more akin to a music video than a commercial. The spot didn’t quite achieve the hit record with the music that Coke had hoped for, but their decision to work with Calvin Harris proved wise; the musician achieved a series of hits that summer, offering the Coke ad an added sense of coolness by association.