UF Pop Culture Expert Picks Advertising Top 20 In New Book

April 12, 2000

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Advertisements nest in our collective psyche like time bombs waiting to go off at the most unlikely moments — during a wedding, for instance, or in the midst of a deep slumber.

The most memorable have staying power that allows them to be handed down from one generation to the next, like family heirlooms. Now, in his latest book, “Twenty Ads That Shook the World,” (Crown, New York) University of Florida advertising and pop culture expert James Twitchell has culled through the ad campaigns of the past 130 years to spotlight what he considers the finest efforts of all time.

Although Twitchell lists the top 20 chronologically rather than in order of preference, he said his pick for the best ad campaign of all time is easy: The Marlboro Man. But all 20, he said, have unique attributes.

“I see these ads as more like big mirrors — sometimes very distorted mirrors — but when they hit us right, we see in them something that is an exaggeration of what we are currently experiencing. Somehow they come together, and the ads and us are the same,” said Twitchell, a UF English professor whose previous books include “AdCult USA” and “For Shame: The Loss of Common Decency in American Culture.” “Twenty Ads” is scheduled for release May 2.

Twitchell defines “the best” as those ads that have ingrained themselves in Americans’ brains while changing the advertising industry in some way and, of course, fulfilling their primary mission: selling the product.

The book starts with P.T. Barnum’s pre-circus hoopla in the 1870s and concludes with the modern-day marriage between Nike and Michael Jordan. But Twitchell said The Marlboro Man campaign is a hands-down winner.

Originally a fairly low-profile cigarette marketed to women, Marlboro received a make-over in the mid-1950s, when Phillip Morris hired ad man Leo Burnett to rebuild the brand’s image. Burnett hit on the rugged cowboy as the perfect peg to hang the ad on, and combined with repackaging — the red-and-white, flip-top box — the make-over was a hit.

Its timing, however, was the icing on the cake.

“It happened at about the same time that we acknowledged in popular culture that this stuff is going to kill you, and so who is this guy? He’s … a real cowboy, he has a real image of independence, and he comes in this tough package. What is he having to confront? He’s having to confront real tragedy — namely, You smoke these, you die,’ and he doesn’t seem to care.”

Also among Twitchell’s favorites: the trend-bucking Volkswagen Beetle campaign of the early 1960s that helped give the Bug its underdog, everyman persona. While Detroit was reaching the peak of its obsession with tying cars to images of jet fighters and space travel, VW took the opposite approach.

“They were essentially subverting a lot of what advertisers were doing then: showing you the gorgeous woman with the big-finned cars,” he said. In VW’s minimalist ads, he said, “you had to read the copy to figure it out, and what the copy was very often saying was, Look, this is not a show-off car. This is a car that’s built to endure.’ Nobody had treated cars like this before.”

Other pitch campaigns on Twitchell’s list include Listerine, which was the first to sell the cure by creating the “disease” of bad breath; Coca-Cola’s annual Santa Claus campaign, because it was the first to create a connection in the public mind between a product and a holiday; and Absolut Vodka’s ongoing campaign (Absolut Perfection, Absolut Vienna, Absolut Electric) for its extraordinary success at persuading people to buy the package — the highly recognizable bottle — despite the product being almost undistinguishable from its competition.

Neither critical nor especially complimentary of today’s commercialized culture, Twitchell said he thinks people should at least have a better understanding of what has become one of the world’s most powerful forces and why it sometimes works so well.

“If you recognize some of the twenty ads that follow — and you will — it is because they are part of what we share,” Twitchell writes. “They are the world wrought not by religion or science or art. They are the world wrought by advertising. They are pushed our way by a culture on the take.’”