The first company widely credited with using Santa Claus in a formal advertising campaign is White Rock (a U.S. mineral water and soda brand), which featured Santa in ads around 1915 for its carbonated water.

Quick Scoop

  • The earliest known company to put Santa into a structured advertising campaign appears to be White Rock Water of San Francisco, which showed a bearded Santa driving a sleigh loaded with its products around 1915.
  • Later, Coca‑Cola made Santa globally iconic with its polished magazine campaigns beginning in 1931 , but it was not the first company ever to use Santa in advertising.
  • Some historians also point to even earlier isolated uses of Santa or Santa‑like figures in 19th‑century ads (for example, an 1860s confectionery ad and an 1880s Ivory Soap ad), but these are typically treated as precursors rather than the first full Santa “campaign” by a brand.

Why people think it was Coca‑Cola

  • Coca‑Cola’s long‑running Christmas campaigns, especially Haddon Sundblom’s warm red‑suited Santa from 1931 onward, strongly shaped the modern visual image of Santa in advertising.
  • Because those ads were so influential and heavily repeated across magazines, billboards, and store displays, many assume Coca‑Cola “invented” Santa in ads, even though companies like White Rock used him years earlier.

TL;DR: In riddle and trivia form, the usual answer to “what was the first company to use Santa Claus in advertising?” is White Rock.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.