This is a story about a holiday commercial with Coca-Cola trucks. Thankfully, it has nothing to do with AI.
This is a Coca-Cola holiday commercial from 2001. Listen to the music.
This is a Coca-Cola holiday commercial from 2018. Listen to the music.
Here’s the story behind that music.
Before the holidays in 2001, a singer named Melanie Thornton co-wrote and recorded “Wonderful Dream (Holidays Are Coming)” for use in a Coca-Cola commercial in Germany.
Thornton had grown up in South Carolina, dreaming of becoming a singer. In 1991, she moved to Germany, where her sister lived, and started singing in nightclubs. After doing studio vocals on dance tracks, she became the lead singer in La Bouche, the European dance group that hit it big in the mid- to late ’90s. Thornton left the group in 2000 to pursue a solo career. She was most popular in Germany, where she eventually gained dual citizenship.
But on Nov. 24, 2001, Thornton was among 24 people killed in a plane crash in Zurich, Switzerland. Their plane went down in the woods on its approach to the runway. She was 34.
Despite Thornton’s death, Coca-Cola went ahead with the German TV ad campaign. The song “Wonderful Dream (Holidays Are Coming)” became a hit in Germany.
Every year since, Coca-Cola commercials using the song have aired on German TV. Every year since, the song has returned to the German singles charts.
“Wonderful Dream (Holidays Are Coming),” Melanie Thornton, 2001, from the European CD maxi-single of the same name. The lyrics are slightly different than those in the commercials.
The concert scenes in this video are from Thornton’s show in Leipzig, Germany, just hours before her plane crashed. She was doing a series of promotional shows for Coca-Cola.
Two days after Thornton’s death, her record label re-released her only solo album, “Ready To Fly.” It shot up the charts in Germany and Switzerland and went gold in 2002, helped along when “Wonderful Dream (Holidays Are Coming)” was added to the original May 2001 release.
The single was re-released in Germany in 2003, 2004 and 2007, and in Europe in 2021 as a 20th-anniversary edition.
“Wonderful Dream (Holidays Are Coming)” has never been released in the United States.