1. Volkswagen / Think Small
Long before the VW Darth Vader Super Bowl ad there was this hugely successful campaign produced by DDB.
Think Small was an advertising campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle, created by Helmut Krone with the copy written by Julian Koenig at the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency in the 1950s. It was ranked as the best advertising campaign of the twentieth century by Ad Age, in a survey of North American advertisements. The campaign has been considered so successful that it did much more than boost sales and build a lifetime of brand loyalty The ad, and the work of the ad agency behind it, changed the very nature of advertising - from the way it's created to what you see as a consumer today.
A little background: fifteen years after World War II, the United States had become a world and consumer superpower; and cars began to be built for growing families with Baby Boomer children and Americans obsessed with muscle cars. The Beetle, a compact, strange-looking automobile, was manufactured in a plant built by the Nazis in Wolfsburg, Germany, which was perceived to make it more challenging to sell the vehicle (being that the car was designed in Nazi Germany). Automobile advertisements back then focused on providing as much information as possible to the reader instead of persuading the reader to purchase a product, and the advertisements were typically rooted more in fantasy than in reality.
Julian Koenig, who started many famous advertising campaigns, teamed with Helmut Krone to create the "Think Small" and "Lemon" ads for Volkswagen under the supervision of William Bernbach. DDB built a print campaign that focused on the Beetle's form, which was smaller than most of the cars being sold at the time. This unique focus in an automobile advertisement brought wide attention to the Beetle. DDB had simplicity in mind, contradicting the traditional association of automobiles with luxury. Print advertisements for the campaign were filled mostly with white space, with a small image of the Beetle shown, which was meant to emphasize its simplicity and minimalism, and the text and fine print that appeared at the bottom of the page listed the advantages of owning a small car.
2. Marlboro / The Marlboro Man
Leo Burnett's campaign for Marlboro projects an image which has made it the biggest-selling cigarette in the world. It has been running, almost unchanged, for over 55 years proving one of the most important axioms in advertising: if it works, keep using it.
Leo's intuitive use of the "handicap principle" struck a chord with males throughout the world. Leo played with the powerful psychological motivation for for males to show off their genes by doing risky and dangerous things. This principle was famously described by Jared Diamond in his book "The Third Chimpanzee":
Look, babe, I am so awesome I can suck down smoke, guzzle alcohol, ignore sleep and still stay irresistible, clearly demonstrating the genetic superiority that would make me a great father of your children.
In the mid-'50s, Marlboro had created a filtered cigarette that they advertised to women as being "Mild as May." They needed a way to capture the male market, though, and that's where Leo Burnett came in. He saw some pictures in a 1949 issue of Life magazine that featured a cowboy doing cowboy things. Burnett saw tons of masculinity, and a way to advertise a product. With little more than the word "Marlboro" and a picture of a rough and tumble cowboy smoking a cigarette, the Marlboro Man campaign was born.
The campaign turned sales on their head, and is still considered one of the most brilliant strokes in advertising of all time.
3. Nike / Just Do It
Together, Nike and Wieden+Kennedy have created many print and television advertisements, and Wieden+Kennedy remains Nike's primary ad agency. It was agency co-founder Dan Wieden who coined the now-famous slogan "Just Do It" for a 1988 Nike ad campaign, which was chosen by Advertising Age as one of the top five ad slogans of the 20th century and enshrined in the Smithsonian Institution. Walt Stack was featured in Nike's first "Just Do It" advertisement, which debuted on July 1, 1988. Wieden credits the inspiration for the slogan to "Let’s do it", the last words spoken by Gary Gilmore before he was executed.
In the late-1970s/early-1980s, Reebok's line of sports apparel sold far better and had a much more robust share of the market, thanks to the explosion of aerobics and general exercise enthusiasm amongst women. Nike, who at the time had little more than a line of marathoners' shoes to their name, wanted a piece of the action.
After the introduction of this advertising campaign Nike's market share jumped from 18% to 43%, and their sales exploded from $800 million a year in 1988 to upwards of $9.2 billion in 1998.
4. Absolut Vodka / Absolut [_______]
Much of Absolut's fame is due to its long-running advertising campaign, created by advertising agency TBWA. Based on the distinctive bottle shape having started around 1980 with photographer Steven Bronstein, and with more than 1500 ads, the ad campaign is one of the longest running ever. The ads frequently feature an Absolut bottle-shaped object in the center and a title "ABSOLUT ____." at the bottom. The original idea for the campaign came from South African art director Geoff Hayes who reported that the idea for the first Absolut ad, Absolut Perfection, came to him in the bathtub.
In the late 1970s, Americans were consuming upwards of 40 million cases of vodka a year. One percent (about 400,000 cases) of that market was imported vodka, and a mere 2.5 percent of that was Absolut. The rest of the imported brands were Russian, and selling on the credibility of Russia as the authority on vodka.
Today, Absolut enjoys a dramatically increased share of the vodka market in the U.S., 4.5 million cases, or half of all imported vodka.
5. Clairol / Does She, or Doesn't She
Clairol hired the advertising firm Foote, Cone & Belding, which assigned the account to a junior copywriter, Shirley Polykoff, who was also the sole female copywriter at the firm. It was her future mother-in-law who inspired the now-famous “Does she…or doesn’t she?” catchphrase. After meeting Polykoff for the first time, she took her son aside and grilled him about the true hue of his girlfriend’s tresses. “Does she color her hair? Or doesn’t she?” the humiliated Polykoff could imagine her mother-in-law-to-be asking.
In fact, Polykoff did, though the practice was not something to which women openly admitted during the Depression, when her future mother-in-law first posed the question. Even by 1956, when Polykoff was assigned the Clairol campaign, hair dye was still considered something only tawdry women used.
To counter the stigma of hair color and create a wholesome image for Clairol, early print ads—some of which were shot by fashion photographers Richard Avedon and Irving Penn—featured girl-next-door-ish models accompanied by children sporting locks of the same shade. The idea was to skew toward the sentimental, not the tawdry.
“Does she…or doesn’t she?” became one of the most effective campaigns of the time: Within six years, 70% of all adult women were coloring their hair, and Clairol’s sales increased 413%. In 1967 Polykoff was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame.
For more info:
http://www.jackrabbitmedia.com/blog/2012/3/11/the-10-most-successful-advertising-campaigns-of-all-time.html
