But amid the ad campaign’s success, an alternate version of the song by the Hillside Singers was quickly released as a single, hitting No. 13 on the Billboard charts and making the studio-assembled group a one-hit wonder, according to Songfacts. The New Seekers promptly followed up with a full-length recording of the song and hit No. 7 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in early 1972. The song reached No. 1 on the UK singles chart.
British songwriter Roger Greenaway opened up about the process of creating the song in an interview with Billboard. He revealed that the song was originally titled “True Love and Apple Pie." But co-writer Bill Davis didn’t think the lyrics were suitable for the Coke campaign.
“After we finished the recording sessions, the commercial went straight to radio — not to TV,” Greenaway recalled to Billboard, noting that the radio ad didn’t get a lot of attention at first. “It wasn’t until a man called Harvey Gabor, who worked in the TV commercial area at McCann, had the idea of filming a group of young men and women of different nationalities and backgrounds standing on a hill with a bottle of Coke in their hand and used ‘Teach the World’ as the anthem that the song took off.”
A massive hit
In an essay for Songwriting magazine, Greenaway said everything changed after the TV commercial aired with the singers on the hill.
“Billy Davis took [the New Seekers] into the studios one afternoon, to produce the single that went to the top of the charts,” the songwriter added. “Within two nights of it being on television here [in the UK], we were selling 150,000 records a day. It went to No. 1 at Christmas, and it sold a million copies in less than 10 days!”
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