Mad Men‘s Creator Spent ‘a Couple of Years’ Approving That Coke Finale

Don Draper bought the world a Coke in the series finale of Mad Men, but it was easier said than done. During an interview with Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday night, star Jon Hamm revealed that while Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner had conceived of the finale’s last moments a couple of years prior, the tricky part was getting permission from Coke to actually make it a reality.

“There was a couple of years process of clearing that with Coca-Cola,” Hamm told Kimmel. After Kimmel joked that if Coke had said no, the show would have been “screwed,” Hamm agreed, and teased an alternate denouement. “Yeah. ‘No thanks.’ You’re like, All right, we’ll call it Coca… Cona,” he joked.

Mad Men ended in May with a scene that linked Don Draper to the famous “I’d Like to Buy The World a Coke” commercial from 1971.

“We’ve had limited awareness around the brand’s role in the series’ final episodes, and what a rich story they decided to tell,” a spokesperson for Coke told PEOPLE in the aftermath of the Mad Men finale. According to the rep, “no money exchanged hands” between the soft-drink company and AMC to facilitate the ad’s inclusion.

This article originally appeared on EW.com

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