Category: Retro Commercials

On Boxing Day 1985, British television viewers watched a young man in a T-shirt and Levi’s 501 jeans walk into a laundromat in small-town America, styled to look like the late 1950s or early 1960s. In front of the other customers, he took off his jeans down to his boxer shorts and put them in a washing machine.

The man was the model Nick Kamen, and the ad came from the agency BBH, which had won the Levi’s account in 1982. It was the idea of BBH cofounder John Hegarty, written with Barbara Nokes, and directed by Roger Lyons. The soundtrack was Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” a 1968 Motown single.

Its effect on sales is often described in huge numbers. Levi’s own history of the ad says that by some estimates sales rose about 800 percent afterward, and another account says the company sold more than two million pairs of boxer shorts in a year. Kamen went on to a music career and had a top-five hit, “Each Time You Break My Heart,” which he co-wrote with Madonna.

Campaign magazine later named it among the best ads of the previous 50 years. In 2006 it was parodied for Comic Relief, with David Beckham and June Brown recreating the scene in the same laundromat.

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.

A surfer stares at the horizon, paddles out, and waits. And waits. When the wave finally arrives, it isn’t water — it’s a stampede of enormous white horses crashing through the surf. He rides it anyway. The whole thing is a metaphor for a pint of stout.

Guinness and agency AMV BBDO built “Surfer” around an inconvenient fact: a proper pint of draught Guinness takes close to two minutes to pour, most of it spent waiting for the head to settle. Rather than hide that, the 1999 campaign turned it into the brand’s whole identity, closing on the line “Good things come to those who wait.” Director Jonathan Glazer shot the ad in black and white, with a thundering remix of Leftfield’s “Phat Planet” driving the horses through the waves.

The ad became an instant landmark in British advertising, repeatedly voted the greatest television commercial ever made in industry and public polls over the following decades. At the 1999 Cannes Lions festival it won the Grand Prix for Film, the highest honor in the medium, and it’s still taught in advertising courses as a masterclass in turning a weakness into a myth.

More than two decades on, “Good things come to those who wait” remains one of the most recognized taglines in advertising, and the surfer-and-horses imagery is still referenced across pop culture. Guinness never had to apologize for how long its pint takes to pour — it made people proud to wait for one.

“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.