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>>Male #1: There he is.
[Laughs]
>>Male #1: I got ya. You ready?
>>Harvey Gabor: Yeah. Goodbye Detroit. Goodbye big tire. Hello big apple.
[Laughter]
>>Harvey Gabor: Is there a job?
>>Male #1: He’s got all his stuff.
[Laughs]
>>Male #1: Look he even brought his Cleo, crazy man.
[Music plays]
>>Lyrics: I’d like to teach the world to sing, sing with me. Perfect harmony. Perfect
harmony. I’d like to buy the world a coke and keep it company. That's the real--
>>Harvey Gabor: Bill Backer was happily drinking Coca Cola and he penned the line, “I’d
like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.” Sitting in an airport on a napkin he wrote
it. There were two guys in England, Cook and Greenaway who wrote a
lovely melody which was so simple and it was so beautiful. I thought that it would be interesting
to do a united chorus of the world. Tepidly they liked it; I thought it was really pretty
good of course the rest is history. People were humming it. Coke got a hundred thousand
letters from people saying they loved it. It’s matched the personality perfectly with
the brand.
[Music plays]
>>Harvey Gabor: There’s New York. I worked in New York from about 1964 to, God, about
20 years. I’m retired but I miss the action. I miss the [inaudible]
[Music plays]
>>Harvey Gabor: Somebody said, “Are your creative juices flowing?” I said, “Not
only that, they’re the only ones.”
[Laughs]
[Music plays]
>>Harvey Gabor: All I know of Google is the search engine. I use it mostly for email and
to look up all my aches and pains and what I disease I think I probably have and are
probably gonna die from.
[Music plays]
>>Harvey Gabor: I see the banners. It looks to me like if you were in an ad agency you
could do it in the morning. Have something go, “Whoop.” And maybe “Whoop.”’
So I’m baffled. I don’t understand, and I’m gonna find out, my problem is absolute
ignorance.
[Music plays]
[People talking]
>>Harvey Gabor: Please be seated.
[Laughter]
>>Harvey Gabor: I’m Harvey Gabor. I’m one of the six grand old men of advertising.
>>Female #1: When you created “Hilltop” what was that thought? What was that one thing
that you kind of said, “Okay, this is now taken it from something that’s okay to something
that’s really great?” Cause “Hilltop” had like a real message and an insight.
>>Harvey Gabor: I don’t really have that one. I can tell you how it came about which
is mostly instinctive. It talks about the world but it really speaks to one person.
I took the temerity of doing a scribble. What would be the best way of doing it? Should
I do it on the board?
>>Female #1: Yeah.
>>Harvey Gabor: I wanna buy the world a home and furnish it with love. Grow apple trees,
honey bees, snow white turtle doves. The most important thing is we get enough people in
here, the rest of the stuff, the doves and all that stuff there, the real subject of
“Buy the world” is the people.
>>Male #2: How do you feel about instead of showing the people is there anything to like
connecting people?
>>Group: Yeah!
>Harvey Gabor: Keep it warm. You know better than I do how to start connecting people.
You know, how about your mother-in-law? I don’t know it wouldn’t be her but how
would you connect the video, you’d just literally put two people together?
>>Male #3: Because it’s done at scale and because it’s done at real time you can say,
“Wouldn’t it be nice?” and then you can show how many people are connecting every
second, every minute and you can show this beautiful spider of it starts with one person
who connects with his boss who connects with his mailman and it grows and grows and grows.
>>Harvey Gabor: You gave it another tier now.
[Music plays]
>>Harvey Gabor: Hi.
>>Male #4: Good morning.
[Music plays]
>>Male #4: If you were consuming and interacting with my brand and my content on a tablet the
things you would expect the app to do would be slightly different than what you would
expect on a laptop and on a phone. And based on the device I also know a little bit about
what kind of environment you might be in.
>>Harvey Gabor: That’s hard for me to grasp.
>>Male #5: A mobile app finds you at the right time at the right place and is personally
interactive.
>>Harvey Gabor: Wow, very cool. Yeah.
>>Male #5: Yeah. So I would love to see how we can harness such a interactive moments
into some of the ad campaigns that we’re thinking about.
>>Harvey Gabor: Right. It’s really fun.
[Laughs]
[Music plays]
>>Male #4: The point is if a man who barely understands what internet is can come in,
sit with us for 48 hours, play with the iPad for the first time ever and then come up with
an idea of how his work from 40 years ago is gonna be translated into a display and
still make sense and actually advance the idea, I mean, that’s fascinating.
>>Male #2: Okay, so let’s, let’s start over.
>>Female #1: Okay so maybe let’s focus on this.
>>Harvey Gabor: The first thing which most creative people would deny is a little bit
insecurity and fear. And that can make you work a little harder because you’ve gotta
present stuff to the client. My own impetus is a little bit of insecurity, “Can you
do it champ?” and it makes the neurotic part of me makes you work much harder. Maybe
it’s even a super?
>>Male #2: Yes.
>>Harvey Gabor: I don’t have a particular way of working, I agree the strategy, do all
the research; it’s a stream of consciousness, etcetera, etcetera. What inspires me is to
recreate the feeling you get when you think you’ve nailed the creator project. There’s
a rush. The creative moment that’s instantaneous and it’s the greatest feeling in the world.
You’rein “flow” they call it. Eight?
[Laughter]
>>Harvey Gabor: We’re in flow with it, we’re just fine.
[Laughter]
>>Male #2: Alright!
>>Harvey Gabor: That’s great. If you’re working with a partner, you say something,
he hits the ball back, he gets excited and pretty soon you have something on the table
that the world never saw before.
>>Male #2: Harvey and Matt. Matt’s in Paris, Harvey’s on his computer in New York City
and when you click this banner this comes out.
>>Harvey Gabor: You can do that?
>>Male #2: We can do this.
>>Harvey Gabor: That’s very good.
[Music plays]
[Applause]
>>Harvey Gabor: Oh my God! Oh my God! For moi?
[Laughter]
>>Harvey Gabor: Holy cow.
>>Female #1: Harvey, I wanted to introduce you to Jackie.
>>Jackie: Hi Harvey I’m Jackie from Coca-Cola.
>>Harvey Gabor: Jackie, nice to see you, I’ve heard a lot about you, nice to meet you.
>>Jackie: I’ve heard a lot more about you than you probably heard about me.
[Laughter]
>>Harvey Gabor: Thank you. Well, 40 years ago, Bill Backer and myself had a wish and
the wish would be to buy the world a Coke. So 40 long years have passed and I’ve lived
long enough to know that now we can deliver that pitch tomorrow.
>>Harvey Gabor: {singing] I wanna buy the world a Coke and furnish it with love. Grow
apple trees and honey bees and snow white turtle doves.
>>Harvey Gabor: You know what a 125 year old soft drink needs? ***! Click! ***! Click!
A little magic.
>>Female #1: This will be, not only on a banner on the internet, but also we will have a functioning
vending machine that is synced with the internet. You pick where you want to send it and all
the way across the world the Coke will come out of the machine with a message with who
it is from.
>>Harvey Gabor: We’re actually sending the Coke to Paris. From my generation that’s
absolutely science fiction.
>>Male #7: I’d love to hear your thoughts, your comments, anything, any feedback.
>>Jackie: I mean, to be honest it’s really overwhelming to hear you, Harvey, kind of
take something that's so iconic that you created and bring it to life in such a modern way.
I love that you didn’t touch the song and you kept it exactly as it was. That’s how
it should be. I mean, it’s wonderful, it’s beautiful.
>>Male #2: Do you think this is something, from our standpoint, that we should move forward
and try and make it happen?
>>Jackie: Absolutely it’s an idea that can move forward.
>>Harvey Gabor: Thank you.
>>Female #1: It was good.
>>Harvey Gabor: It was very good.
>>Female #1: It was so good.
[Music plays]
>>Harvey Gabor: I can’t believe it, disbelief.
[Laughter]
[Music plays]
>>Female #3: What up Buenos Aires? Hope you enjoy your Coke!
>>Female #4: Hello Argentina! Here’s a
small gift from me. I’m Nelly from Cape Town, Bye!
>>Male #8: Nelly from Cape Town a kiss from Buenos Aires. I hope you have a great time
as I am having.
[Music plays]
[Kids yelling]
>>Female #5: Oh my God that’s so great!
[Laughter]
>>Harvey Gabor: What Google did was very creative. They said, “What would happen if we married
the best of the old and the best of the new?” No one ever did that before. [laughing]
>>Harvey Gabor: It’s still pretty good.