Don Draper and Elle Macpherson

On last week’s episode of Mad Men (season 3, episode 4), the fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency shot a TV spot for the then-new diet cola Patio. 1962-3 was the year of diet soda, with the introduction of RC Cola’s Diet Rite, Pepsi’s Patio and Coca Cola’s TaB.

As often happens after the show, I found myself pondering old products and advertisements, in this case ads for diet cola in particular. As a part of my pondering, I scanned a number of old TV ads on YouTube, before eventually falling upon this 1982 ad for TaB, which features model Elle Macpherson.

She looks so young doesn’t she? I looked it up: Macpherson was born in the spring of 1963, which means she was 19 when this ad was shot. We know from the televised JFK speech at the end of Mad Men 0304 that its events take place in early June, 1963. We also know that Betty Draper’s new baby is “about to pop.” Which means that Elle Macpherson is just about exactly the right age to be Don and Betty Draper’s new daughter. This is an absurd and useless observation, of course (Macpherson is Australian, for one thing), but a satisfyingly thematic way to put things in the perspective of time.

Of course, the TaB TV spot is remarkable on its own… is the refrain, “So good for beautiful people” really any less absurd than Sterling Cooper’s faux Ann-Margaret squealing “bye-bye sugar?”

Incidentally, all that TaB talk conjured an irrational and embarrassing craving for the stuff, which tastes gross but still much better than Diet Coke. The Patio name is long discontinued, but TaB very easy to find, at least it is here in Atlanta, Coca-Cola’s hometown. Here’s the 12-pack I picked up in Target:

Of course, two cans was plenty, yet now I have 10 cans of TaB to account for.

One final note, in an effort to connect this rambling post to broader topics of interest to me: the name “TaB” was apparently an early example of a computer-generated text, of sorts:

According to an Atlanta Magazine article published in May 1963, Coca-Cola’s marketing research department used its IBM 1401 computer to generate a list of over 250,000 four-letter words with one vowel, adding names suggested by the company’s own staff. The list was stripped of any words deemed unpronounceable or too similar to existing trademarks. From a final list of about twenty names, “Tabb” was chosen, influenced by the possible play on words, and shortened to “Tab” during development, and designer Sid Dickens gave the name its familiar capitalisation pattern (“TaB”) in the logo he designed.