(Hey, this post is about the end of Mad Men, so don’t read it if you don’t want to know about that.)
That brand-friendly Mad Men ending almost didn’t happen. During an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live last night, Mad Men star and generally cool-seeming human being Jon Hamm told the host that Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, who revealed in an interview shortly after the finale that he started planning Don’s cliffside Coca-Cola revelation long before the final season, tried to convince Coca-Cola to let the show use its iconic “I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke” commercial for “a couple of years” before permission was granted. Hamm jokingly then told Kimmel that, had Coke not bought Weiner’s vision, the show’s ending could have gone a very different direction—or towards a product called “Cona Cona.”
In an interview with People after the Mad Men finale, a spokesman for Coke said that “no money exchanged hands” for the ad’s placement and that the company “had limited awareness around the brand’s role in the series’ final episodes and what a rich story they decided to tell.”