It's Beautiful

Why it works

"America the Beautiful" passes from voice to voice and from language to language (seven of them, by Coca-Cola's count) over a montage of American life: cowboy hats and hijabs, families dining out and roller-skating, and a family with two dads. Wieden+Kennedy Portland made the 60-second film and John Hillcoat directed it. It aired during Super Bowl XLVIII on February 2, 2014, and by the next morning critics were cataloguing tweets demanding the song be sung in English, while supporters answered just as loudly. It is studied as a brand deliberately stepping into a national argument about who counts as American: it was reported as the first Super Bowl ad to show gay parents, and the online fight it provoked became the subject of peer-reviewed research on multilingualism. Coca-Cola had already planned a 90-second version for the Winter Olympics opening ceremony days later, and it re-ran the film in the pregame show of Super Bowl LI in 2017, amid that year's divisive political climate.