There are songs that begin in recording studios, and then there are songs that begin somewhere else entirely — in a quiet moment, in an unexpected place, when someone was simply trying to get home. This one started with a travel delay, a group of stranded strangers, and a single observation that turned into one of the most recognized melodies of the 1970s.

What began as an advertising commission became something that listeners refused to leave behind on the radio. They wanted to own it, carry it with them, and hear it away from television screens.

The standalone song became “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)” by The New Seekers.

Bill Backer’s Delayed Journey

The story behind this song is one of those rare advertising histories that feels almost accidental in the best possible way. In early 1971, a creative director named Bill Backer was flying from New York to London to work on a Coca-Cola advertising campaign with composers Billy Davis, Roger Cook, and Roger Greenaway. His flight was diverted and forced to land in Shannon, Ireland, due to heavy fog. Passengers were stuck overnight, frustrated and tired.

By the next morning, something had shifted. Backer noticed that the delayed travelers — people from different countries, different backgrounds, all of them originally annoyed — had found their way to the airport café, sharing conversations and, reportedly, soft drinks. The tension of the delay had dissolved into something warmer. Small talk had turned into something that looked a little like connection.

That image stayed with him. He later described sketching a few lines on a napkin — the beginning of a lyric about teaching the world to sing, about people finding common ground. It was a small moment of inspiration, but it carried the whole idea that would eventually reach millions of listeners around the world.

When the creative team finally gathered in London, Backer brought that concept to the table. Davis, Cook, and Greenaway helped build a melody around it. The original working version of the tune was called “True Love and Apple Pie,” a draft that carried the same underlying melody but without the language that would eventually make it memorable. Over the following weeks, they refined the lyrics and shaped the song into something that could anchor a major advertising campaign.

The phrase that would anchor it all — about buying the world something, about a gesture of shared goodwill — came directly from that fog-delayed morning in Ireland. The delay that annoyed everyone at the time turned out to be the most productive weather event in advertising history.

Creating the Radio Jingle

Before any film was shot, the song existed as a radio jingle. The earliest version was recorded for broadcast advertising, and the response from listeners surprised nearly everyone involved. Stations began reporting that people were calling in to ask about the song. They wanted to hear it again. Some wanted to know if they could buy a copy.

This was not a common response to advertising music in 1971. Jingles were tools. They were written to attach a product to a feeling, to stay in a listener’s memory long enough to influence a purchase. They were not usually things people wanted to collect or carry into their private lives. But this particular melody had something different in it — a warmth and an openness that seemed to reach past the product entirely.

The advertising team recognized what was happening. The song was generating genuine emotional interest in a way that went beyond the campaign’s original purpose. That recognition would eventually lead to a decision that was unusual for the era: strip the product references out and release the song as a standalone single.

But first, there was a commercial to make.

The Hilltop Commercial

The television advertisement that followed is now remembered as one of the most discussed pieces of broadcast advertising ever produced. Shot in the summer of 1971 on a hilltop outside Rome, it featured a large gathering of young people from many different countries, each holding a soft drink, arranged across a green hillside as they performed the song together. The visual idea was simple and direct: people from all over the world, side by side, singing the same thing.

The production was not without difficulties. The original filming in London had to be abandoned due to poor weather, which added a certain irony to a project that had begun with a weather delay. The team relocated to Italy, where the hillside shoot was completed.

When the advertisement aired in the United States in July 1971, it drew an immediate response. Viewers called television stations. Letters arrived at the broadcasting networks. People wanted to know where they could find the song. The reaction confirmed what the radio version had already suggested — audiences were connecting with the melody on a level that had very little to do with purchasing decisions.

The commercial version of the song, performed for the advertisement by a studio group called The Hillside Singers, charted on its own. But a different recording would ultimately become the version most people remember.

Removing the Product References

The New Seekers were a British-Australian vocal group who had been finding success in the early 1970s with polished, harmony-driven pop recordings. When the decision was made to release a non-advertising version of the song, the lyrics needed adjustment. The references that tied the melody to any specific product were removed and replaced with imagery that could stand entirely on its own — apple trees, honeybees, and the broader vision of the world singing together.

The result was a song that owed its existence to a commercial campaign but no longer belonged to one. It stood alone as a piece of music, asking nothing of its listeners except that they feel something for a moment.

The New Seekers recorded their version with those rewritten lyrics, and it was released as a single in late 1971. The group’s sound — clean harmonies, bright production, and an optimism that felt genuine rather than forced — suited the song well. Their version carried the melody into territory the advertising version could never quite reach: album collections, jukeboxes, and radio stations that programmed music rather than commercials.

For many listeners who discovered the song years or decades later, the advertising origin was not immediately obvious. The song simply sounded like a product of its early-seventies moment — hopeful, open, and built on the kind of harmony that the era favored.

Two Competing Hit Versions

What followed was an unusual situation in pop music history. Two versions of essentially the same song competed on the charts at nearly the same time. The Hillside Singers, who had recorded the version used in the original commercial, released their recording commercially and reached the top forty in the United States. The New Seekers released their standalone version and took it to the top five in the United Kingdom, where it reached number one in early 1972. Their version also performed strongly in the United States and across Europe.

Both recordings shared the same foundational melody and most of the same spirit. The primary difference was in the lyrics — the Hillside Singers version retained some of the original advertising language, while The New Seekers sang the fully rewritten text. For listeners at the time, hearing either version on the radio carried the same warm, slightly utopian feeling that had made the commercial so affecting in the first place.

The song was nominated for a Grammy Award. It became part of the soundscape of the early 1970s in a way that few singles manage — appearing in living rooms, on school radio programs, at community events, and in the memories of an entire generation of listeners who may not have known or cared where the melody had first appeared.

Some songs are remembered because they topped a chart. Others are remembered because they seem to arrive at exactly the right moment in a person’s life and refuse to leave. “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” did something rarer still — it arrived in people’s living rooms as an advertisement, and then somehow followed them out the door and into the rest of their lives.

The fog in Shannon lifted. The travelers went home. And somewhere in the middle of all that delay and inconvenience, a melody found its way into the world. Decades later, many people who grew up hearing it on the radio still find themselves humming it without quite knowing why — and that, perhaps, is the clearest sign of all that something real was captured in those few lines sketched on a napkin in an Irish airport café.