Laughs

When Wieden & Kennedy rebranded Old Spice, they launched a campaign that helped redefine the brand. “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” took the concept of manliness from scruffy and expected to classy and cool.

When Ogilvy and Mather was tasked with evolving the credit card giant’s upscale image, the agency wisely cast Jerry Seinfeld in a series of ads for the American Express Green Card in 1992.

Han·gry (ˈhaNGɡrē/) adjective/informal: Bad-tempered or irritable, as a result of hunger. Although this hybrid word may be relatively new, the sensation of hanger has been around since the dawn of time.

Strategize the rainbow, taste the rainbow. At first glance, one might think that these Skittle ads were just a product of the weirdest sh** the campaign team could fit into 30 second spots.

Simple. Effective. Funny. These three characteristics defined the first great campaign of the new millennium, from TBWA/Chiat/Day.

Another agency-defining campaign for Wieden + Kennedy Portland was the 25-year partnership with ESPN’s Sportscenter. Together, they produced over 400 spots. Executed in a “deadpan documentary” style, many of the ads were very inside baseball (pun intended), meaning that they relied on knowledge of sports to understand the punchline.

Before he “switched to Sprint” Paul Marcarelli started his 10 year contract with Verizon as their test man in 2002.

This was the decade of the great creative Super Bowl face-off from two of the game’s largest advertisers. Overall, Pepsi won, but as the 1990s ended, Budweiser dominated.

Perhaps the most famous commodity brand campaign in history, “Got Milk?” launched its first spot in 1993. The ad featured a hilarious storyline involving a Hamilton-Burr history buff who couldn’t answer a Hamilton-Burr radio contest question because his mouth was full of PB&J. If only he had a glass of milk!

Entering into the 1980’s, Rolling Stone had a reputation as the nitty grittiest of magazines. Fallon’s “Perception. Reality” campaign set out to change this by cleverly highlighting (in over 60 print executions) how the magazine’s readers were no longer hippies, but were now affluent and mainstream.

When Clara Peller first said “Where’s the Beef?” in a humorous ad for Wendy’s in 1984, the company had no idea the catchphrase would become a household expression.

The “Fast Talker Campaign” for Federal Express featured John Moschitta’s rapid fire, non-stop speaking about the fast-paced business world. Its launch is still considered one of the greatest comedy spots of all time.

2017 Revisited. For the 4A’s 50th Anniversary in 1967, Jim Nelson, of Hoefer Dieterich & Brown created this “back to the future” view of what the advertising industry would be like in 2017.

An early example of innovative out-of-home advertising was executed by the brushless Burma Shave Company. They did it by creating the concept of sequential billboards. In 1926, strings of rhyming Burma Shave billboards popped up all across the US, taking the company from virtually unheard of to the number two shaving cream company in the US.

Burger King released Subservient Chicken as a launch for their new chicken sandwich, taking the tagline “Chicken Your Way” to an all too literal place.