Vintage 1994 Coca‑Cola Super Bowl Door Hanger 🏈 Advertising Promo – NOS

Who Hung a Coca-Cola on Your Doorknob for the Super Bowl? 🏈 1994 Coca-Cola Big TV Door Hanger, NOS

Size: 10 1/2" x 3"

In January 1994 the Super Bowl came to Atlanta, the city where Coca-Cola was born, and Coke made sure you heard about it before you even got out the front door. This is one of the door hangers they printed to put Coca-Cola Big TV on people's doorknobs: a sunburst die-cut hole at the top, a big "WATCH" across the black panel, and the whole weekend's schedule printed right there in yellow. These are new old stock. They never made it onto a doorknob at all.

📺 What Was Coca-Cola Big TV?

Four days of Super Bowl programming that Coca-Cola put on itself, hosted by Pat O'Brien and Terry Bradshaw. Coke's own magazine ads that winter promised "four days of gut-wrenching, heart-pounding Super Bowl excitement. And that's before the game starts!" and said the Super Bowl was "just too big to fit on one channel." The idea was to take you behind the scenes at Super Bowl XXVIII, with parties, interviews, comedy, music and celebrities, and it ran Thursday, January 27 through Sunday, January 30 on the NFL Super Bowl Channel, in association with Sports Illustrated TV, with Comedy Central and E! along for the ride.

The back of the hanger sells it the same way: "Meet the players and coaches... Go to the parties... Be at the press conferences... Meet all the celebrities." The front calls it your "backstage pass," and that fits. Pat O'Brien hosted Coca-Cola's live "Backstage at the Super Bowl" specials, and he and Terry Bradshaw had been working side by side on CBS's The NFL Today since 1990.

📡 "Catch the Excitement on SportSouth"

This hanger is the local version, and it gives you the times: Thursday 9 to 10 PM, Friday 9 to 11, Saturday 9:30 to 11:30, and Sunday, game day, 1:30 to 3:30 in the afternoon, right up until it was time to flip over for the kickoff. SportSouth was Atlanta's own regional sports channel, launched by Turner Broadcasting with TCI and Scripps-Howard on August 29, 1990. It was the home of the Braves and the Hawks (and the Charlotte Hornets), and it carried WCW wrestling too. Fox bought it in 1996 and it became Fox Sports South the next spring, so that SportSouth logo belongs to a pretty short window.

🏟️ Super Bowl XXVIII, in Coke's Hometown

The game was played January 30, 1994, at the Georgia Dome, the first Super Bowl ever held in Georgia. It was also the first time the same two teams met in back-to-back Super Bowls, and the Dallas Cowboys beat the Buffalo Bills again, 30 to 13, with Emmitt Smith named MVP. NBC had the broadcast and 72,817 people were in the building. For Coca-Cola it was a home game. The very first Coca-Cola was poured at Jacobs' Pharmacy in Atlanta on May 8, 1886, Asa Candler founded The Coca-Cola Company there in 1892, and Coke went all in for the big week, right down to commemorative Super Bowl XXVIII bottles.

🥤 Always Coca-Cola

Down at the bottom of both sides is the red "ALWAYS Coca-Cola" disc with the bottle, and that slogan was brand new. "Always Coca-Cola" launched in February 1993 with a run of commercials out of Creative Artists Agency. It's the same campaign that gave us the polar bears, who made their debut in "Northern Lights" during the 1993 NBA Finals. When this hanger was printed, "Always" wasn't even a year old.

®️ The Fine Print

The foot line reads "©1994 The Coca-Cola Company. 'Coca-Cola,' the Dynamic Ribbon device and the Contour Bottle design are registered trademarks of The Coca-Cola Company." Both of those have a story. The Dynamic Ribbon, the white wave Coke runs under its script, was introduced on October 14, 1969, designed by Rei Yoshimura for Lippincott & Margulies. The Contour Bottle goes back to the Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana, which patented it on November 16, 1915, and Coca-Cola got the shape itself registered as a trademark in 1960. That's the bottle standing right in the middle of the Big TV logo.

🔍 Condition

New old stock: never hung, never bent around a doorknob, with the die-cut hole and its eight little slits all still intact. Black panel, crisp yellow schedule, bright red logo, little to no wear.

⭐ Will You Find Another One?

I haven't found another one of these door hangers for sale anywhere. The Big TV magazine ads turn up, and so do the caps, but a door hanger with one weekend's TV schedule on it was made to be hung up and thrown out by Monday, and that's what happened to them.

🖼️ Display Ideas

At 10 1/2" x 3" it's long and skinny, so it frames nicely on its own or alongside a Super Bowl XXVIII program, a commemorative bottle, or a Cowboys or Bills piece from that season. Or hang it on the man cave door for your next Super Bowl party and see who remembers Coca-Cola Big TV.