The pause that doesn't refresh

America is on hold until the election is decided

In 1919, Archie Lee left his job as a newspaper reporter to join the St. Louis agency producing ads for Coca-Cola.

“Like most advertisers of that time, Coca-Cola published a variety of statements in newspapers and magazines and used billboards with varying appeals,” the St. Louis Globe-Democrat wrote. “Lee introduced a practice now basic in advertising: a theme for the printed message and a pattern for the billboard, with emphasis on repetition.”

He tried a variety of slogans, but in 1929, Lee crafted the one that would stick: Coke was “the pause that refreshes.”

It would become one of the most successful advertising pitches in American history, helping to build the brand for the next two decades and beyond. “No single individual has done more to popularize Coca-Cola than Archie Lee,” the company’s president, Robert Woodruff, once said. That included commissioning artist Haddon Sundblom to create a Christmas ad that would forever fix in children’s minds the image of Santa Claus as a rotu…