Unforgettable Advertisement

Author: Unforgettable Advertisement

  • Coca-Cola’s “Hey Kid, Catch!”: The Ad That Made ‘Mean’ Joe Greene Smile

    Coca-Cola’s “Hey Kid, Catch!”: The Ad That Made ‘Mean’ Joe Greene Smile

    A tired, limping football player heads down a stadium tunnel after a game. A small boy in the shadows offers him a bottle of Coke. The player, Pittsburgh Steelers defensive tackle “Mean” Joe Greene, drinks it in one go, then smiles, tosses the kid his jersey and says the line the ad is named after: “Hey kid, catch!”

    The commercial debuted on October 1, 1979, during the Major League Baseball playoffs. It was written by Penny Hawkey at McCann Erickson and directed by N. Lee Lacy, with young Tommy Okon as the boy. It aired again around Super Bowl XIV in early 1980, just as Greene’s Steelers were winning the championship, which only added to its fame.

    Nothing in it is a joke and there is no clever twist. The story is a small act of kindness between a scary-looking star and a shy fan, and a bottle of Coke is what connects them. Viewers wrote tens of thousands of letters to Coca-Cola about it, and the company later remade the idea with sports stars in other countries, including Thailand, Italy and Brazil.

    The ad won a Clio and a Cannes Gold Lion. Greene, who was a Hall of Fame player, received his Clio trophy decades later, on the ad’s 30th anniversary. It is still the standard example of how an ad can borrow an athlete’s tough image and use it to tell a warm story.

  • John Lewis’s “Monty the Penguin”: The Christmas Ad That Sold a Lonely Penguin a Girlfriend

    John Lewis’s “Monty the Penguin”: The Christmas Ad That Sold a Lonely Penguin a Girlfriend

    In Britain, the John Lewis Christmas ad is an event. The 2014 edition told a small story in two minutes: a boy named Sam and his best friend Monty, a penguin who bounces on trampolines and skids across the kitchen floor, but who quietly wants someone of his own. It was created by Adam&Eve/DDB and directed by Dougal Wilson.

    The ending is the whole trick. On Christmas morning, Sam gives Monty the one gift he could not buy himself: a penguin girlfriend, waiting in a box under the tree. The soundtrack was Tom Odell’s cover of John Lennon’s “Real Love,” and it turned a department store ad into something people wanted to talk about.

    The release was planned like a TV premiere. The film went live at 8am on YouTube and Facebook, then aired on Channel 4 during Gogglebox. It passed 2.5 million views in less than 12 hours.

    The business results followed. John Lewis’s Christmas sales rose 5.5% year on year, in a market that grew 1.5%, and eBay reported a 300% jump in penguin toys across its site. Monty later got a children’s book of his own, and the ad set the bar for every emotional Christmas ad that came after it.

  • Coca-Cola’s “Hilltop”: The 1971 Ad That Bought the World a Coke

    Coca-Cola’s “Hilltop”: The 1971 Ad That Bought the World a Coke

    On January 18, 1971, McCann Erickson creative Bill Backer was flying to London when fog forced his plane to land in Shannon, Ireland. Stranded passengers from all over the world ended up in the airport cafe, talking and sharing bottles of Coke. Backer scribbled a line on a napkin: “I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.”

    That napkin became “Hilltop.” Coca-Cola shot it on a hillside in Manziana, outside Rome, with a multicultural group of young people singing the song and holding bottles labelled in many languages. It reportedly cost $250,000, which made it the most expensive commercial ever made at the time. The first shoot was ruined by rain and location problems, so the crew had to start again.

    It debuted in July 1971 and viewers responded so strongly that the jingle became a real pop hit. The New Seekers’ version, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” reached number one in the UK and number seven in the US, while a rival cover by the Hillside Singers peaked at number thirteen on the Billboard Hot 100. Coca-Cola gave $80,000 in royalties from the song to UNICEF.

    Decades later the ad returned to the spotlight when it closed the 2015 series finale of Mad Men, a show about the same industry. The commercial’s promise was simple and a little naive, but it made a soft drink feel like an invitation to sit together, and few ads have been remembered as fondly.

  • Evian’s “Roller Babies”: The Ad That Made 45 Million People Watch Babies Skate

    Evian’s “Roller Babies”: The Ad That Made 45 Million People Watch Babies Skate

    In July 2009, Evian released a web film with almost no story: a crowd of babies on roller skates, dancing to the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”. There was no voiceover and no product pitch beyond the brand’s closing line. It was made for the internet first, not for TV.

    It worked on an enormous scale. Guinness World Records certified it as the most viewed online advertisement ever, with 45,166,109 views as of November 9, 2009, just a few months after launch. Its total reach passed 100 million views, and a large share of those came from fan uploads on sites far outside Evian’s own YouTube channel.

    Behind it was BETC Euro RSCG in Paris, with Rémi Babinet as creative director and Michael Gracey directing. The babies were computer-generated, but their tiny expressions were what people shared. Babinet had already made Evian’s “Water Babies” in 1998, so this was a return to a character the brand knew well, rebuilt for the YouTube era.

    The film won a Pencil at D&AD in 2010, and Evian followed it with a sequel, “Baby & Me.” Its real legacy is the lesson it gave brands: a video does not need a message to spread. If it makes people smile fast, they will pass it on for you.

  • Sony Bravia’s “Balls”: The Ad That Turned San Francisco Into a Giant Pinball Machine

    Sony Bravia’s “Balls”: The Ad That Turned San Francisco Into a Giant Pinball Machine

    On November 6, 2005, Sony needed a way to convince British TV audiences that its new Bravia LCD sets could show colour like nothing else on the market. Rather than shoot a studio close-up of a screen, agency Fallon London and director Nicolai Fuglsig decided to answer the brief with colour itself: no television in sight, just 250,000 bouncy balls let loose down the steepest street in San Francisco.

    What makes the film remarkable is what is missing from it: any CGI at all. Every ball bouncing past parked cars and down a steep San Francisco hill was real, released from trucks and captured in-camera with no visual effects whatsoever. The crew spent weeks phoning every funfair operator and toy distributor they could find just to source enough balls, then set them loose to the hushed, downtempo sound of Jose Gonzalez’s cover of “Heartbeats.”

    The shoot did not go quietly. Loose balls dented 32 parked cars and cracked windows on six houses along the route, and it took a cleanup crew of 45 people to sweep the streets afterward. Even so, more than a thousand balls were never recovered, quietly rolling into storm drains and gardens around the city, an odd little footnote residents still bring up when the ad comes up in conversation.

    “Balls” went on to win the Grand Prix at Cannes and is still taught as a case study in advertising schools for a simple reason: at a time when digital effects could fake almost anything, Sony proved that doing something for real was still the most persuasive trick in the book. The film’s success was big enough that Sony returned the following year with a follow-up, “Paint,” trading bouncy balls for exploding fireworks of colour.

  • Apple’s “Get a Mac”: The Ad Campaign That Turned Two Guys Into Rival Operating Systems

    Apple’s “Get a Mac”: The Ad Campaign That Turned Two Guys Into Rival Operating Systems

    A guy in jeans introduces himself as a Mac. A guy in a beige suit introduces himself as a PC. That’s it — that’s the whole format, repeated dozens of times over three years, and it became one of the most recognizable advertising bits of the 2000s.

    Apple and agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab launched “Get a Mac” in May 2006, casting actor Justin Long as the relaxed, casually dressed Mac and writer-actor John Hodgman as the stiff, suit-wearing PC. Each thirty-second spot dropped the pair into an empty white space for a short exchange about one specific pain point of using a Windows computer — viruses, forced restarts, bloated software — with the PC always coming off worse. No product shots, no spec sheets, just two characters and a punchline.

    The format was simple enough to repeat endlessly without wearing out its welcome, running new installments through 2009 across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan (the UK version swapped in comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb). “Hello, I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC” became a cultural catchphrase, parodied on late-night television and eventually provoking Microsoft into its own direct-response campaign, “I’m a PC.”

    Apple’s share of the personal computer market roughly doubled over the campaign’s run, and analysts routinely point to “Get a Mac” as a case study in building a brand identity out of personality rather than features. Nearly two decades later, the pairing of a laid-back guy and a guy in a suit is still shorthand for the entire Mac-versus-PC rivalry.