Unforgettable Advertisement

Author: Unforgettable Advertisement

  • Apple’s “Think Different”: The Ad Without a Single Apple Product In It

    There is no computer in this commercial. No mouse, no monitor, no product shot, no price, no feature list. For a company that had just posted a $1 billion annual loss and was ninety days from running out of cash by some estimates, that omission was either reckless or the smartest move Apple ever made.

    Steve Jobs had just returned to Apple in 1997 after twelve years away, and the company he came back to barely resembled the one he’d co-founded. TBWA\Chiat\Day, the same agency behind Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl spot, was brought back in to help rebuild the brand from nothing but reputation.

    Junior art director Craig Tanimoto pitched pairing the Apple name with 20th-century figures who’d changed their fields: Einstein, Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, John Lennon, Picasso. Copywriter Rob Siltanen and creative director Ken Segall built the words around them, a free-verse piece that began, according to the finished spot, with a tribute to misfits and troublemakers who refuse to accept the world as they find it.

    Jobs recorded his own narration for an internal version, but the read that actually aired belonged to actor Richard Dreyfuss. Black-and-white archival footage of each figure rolled under his voice, ending on the two words that would define Apple’s identity for the next five years: think different, grammatically loose on purpose.

    Thirteen years earlier, Apple had introduced itself to the world with a very different kind of ad — a sledgehammer thrown at a screen instead of a slogan read over faces. Both spots share the same instinct: sell a worldview, not a spec sheet.

  • Budweiser’s “Whassup?!”: The Ad That Predicted How the Internet Would Talk

    “test”Whassup?!” wasn’t built by an ad agency chasing a trend. It was ripped almost whole from a short film nobody at Budweiser had commissioned. A DDB Chicago creative named Vinny Warren came across a grainy 1998 short called True, made by director Charles Stone III, in which Stone and his real-life friends greeted each other on the phone by shouting the title’s slurred question back and forth.

    Warren noticed something: everyone he showed the film to would greet him with “Whassup?!” the next time they saw him. He pitched Anheuser-Busch on recreating it almost beat for beat, just with the friends holding Budweisers. Stone was hired to direct, and most of the original cast from True reprised their roles.

    The first spot quietly aired during Monday Night Football on December 20, 1999, then again during Super Bowl XXXIV two months later. There was no plot, no product benefit stated, no punchline beyond the phrase itself repeated with escalating enthusiasm. That absence of a joke turned out to be the joke.

    “Whassup?!” became one of the fastest-spreading catchphrases in American television, repeated in classrooms, on sitcoms, and eventually by people who had never seen a frame of the actual commercial. Anheuser-Busch’s own estimate put the campaign’s earned media value at roughly $20 million in its first year alone, not counting internet chatter nobody had a way to measure yet.

    It won the Cannes Grand Prix and ran until 2002, but its real legacy is structural: it proved a commercial could function as a piece of internet-native meme culture years before there was an internet capable of hosting one. Every ad that has ever tried to manufacture a catchphrase since owes something to four guys on a couch saying nothing at all.

  • Volvo’s Epic Split: How Jean-Claude Van Damme Sold Trucks by Doing the Splits

    There’s no CGI in this ad. That’s the entire point of it, and it’s also why it worked. Volvo Trucks needed a way to demonstrate Dynamic Steering, a new stability system, without putting out another spec sheet nobody would read.

    Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors had already built five Live Test films for Volvo Trucks — stunts involving tightrope walkers and hamster wheels — but the sixth needed to top all of them. During early interviews, an engineer mentioned reversing a truck and trailer at high speed and being amazed by how stable it felt. That offhand comment became the seed of the entire concept.

    Jean-Claude Van Damme, then 53, stood with one foot on each side mirror of two Volvo FM trucks as they drove backward in a straight line, slowly separating. As the gap widened, he lowered himself into a full split between them, narrating the whole thing himself: a short reflection on the ups and downs of his career, timed perfectly to end as his legs reached full extension.

    Director Andreas Nilsson shot the whole thing in a single unedited take at a disused airstrip in Ciudad Real, Spain, timed to a narrow sunrise window to get the light right. It took three days of rehearsal before Van Damme performed the actual stunt, secured by a harness hidden just out of frame.

    It passed 100 million views within a week and is still cited as one of the clearest examples of B2B advertising ever made — a truck company convincing millions of people who will never buy a truck to watch, share, and remember exactly what Dynamic Steering does.

  • Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches: The FBI Sketch Artist Who Made 114 Million People Cry

    Only 4 percent of women around the world describe themselves as beautiful. Dove had that statistic sitting in research for years before anyone figured out how to make it land. The answer, it turned out, wasn’t a commercial at all — it was a police sketch room.

    Ogilvy Brazil brought in Gil Zamora, an FBI-trained forensic artist who had drawn over 3,000 criminal suspects from witness descriptions alone. For this project, he sat behind a curtain with seven women, one at a time, and asked each to describe her own face. Later, a stranger who’d spent a few minutes with each woman the day before described that same face from memory.

    Zamora drew both versions without ever seeing the women himself. When the two sketches were placed side by side, the gap was hard to watch: the self-described portraits were consistently harsher, older, less open — the stranger’s version was almost always warmer and more accurate. One participant simply says, looking at both drawings, that she should be “more grateful” for her appearance.

    Dove uploaded the film in 25 languages across more than 40 of its YouTube channels at once, betting on a global release instead of a market-by-market rollout. It hit 114 million views in its first month, becoming, at the time, the most-watched ad film ever posted online. It later won the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes.

    It wasn’t without criticism — several writers pointed out that nearly every woman cast in the film was young, thin, and conventionally attractive, which undercut its own message about broadening beauty standards. That critique still shapes how people discuss the film today. But as a piece of advertising built entirely around a single unscripted moment of recognition, it remains one of the few campaigns people describe as personal rather than clever.

  • Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”: How One Ad Doubled Sales in a Single Take

    Sixty percent. That’s roughly how much of the world’s body wash is bought by women, even though it’s marketed almost entirely to men. Wieden+Kennedy’s creative team found that insight buried in shopping data, and it became the entire foundation for one of the most quoted ad campaigns of the century.

    Old Spice, a brand most twenty-somethings associated with their grandfathers, was losing ground fast to Axe by the late 2000s. Procter & Gamble handed the problem to Wieden+Kennedy Portland, whose brief wasn’t to convince young men to buy Old Spice. It was to convince the people actually standing in the aisle choosing it.

    Director Tom Kuntz shot the entire 33-second spot in one uninterrupted take, with actor Isaiah Mustafa moving through a shower, a boat, and a horse without a single visible cut. No CGI, minimal editing tricks, just choreography and a script that never took itself seriously. It aired online four days before the 2010 Super Bowl and on television that same weekend.

    The follow-up is what turned a good ad into a case study. Over two and a half days, the Wieden+Kennedy team filmed nearly 190 personalized video responses to fans, journalists, and celebrities on Twitter, scripting, shooting, and posting each one within hours. It became, by most measures, the fastest-growing interactive campaign YouTube had seen at that point.

    The results were not subtle. Old Spice Red Zone body wash sales were up 60 percent within three months and had doubled by July. Ad Age later ranked the campaign among the best of the 21st century, and it remains one of the few ads people can still quote a line from more than a decade later.

  • Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl Ad: The Commercial That Changed Advertising Forever

    Apple’s “1984” commercial aired only once, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984. Directed by Ridley Scott, fresh off Blade Runner, the 60-second spot cost roughly $500,000 to produce and never once showed the product it was selling: the Macintosh computer.

    The ad tells the story of a totalitarian society, straight out of George Orwell’s novel, glued to a giant screen broadcasting a Big Brother figure. A lone athlete sprints down the aisle and hurls a sledgehammer into the screen, shattering it in a blast of light. A voiceover announces the launch of the Macintosh, closing with the line that made the ad legendary: you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”

    What makes this commercial a masterclass in advertising is what it refused to do. It never showed the Macintosh, never listed a single spec, and barely mentioned Apple by name. Instead, it sold a feeling: rebellion against conformity. That emotional positioning became the template every disruptive tech brand has copied since.

    Apple’s own board reportedly hated the ad when they first saw it, and the company tried to sell back its Super Bowl airtime before the game. It aired anyway, ran only once nationally, and is still widely ranked as the greatest Super Bowl commercial of all time, decades later.