The Greatest Advertising Campaigns in American History - PDF

The greatest advertising campaigns in American history If you’ve ever watched the hit American TV series Mad Men, you’ll know how important and influential advertising campaigns were back in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, in the agencies of Madison Avenue in New York, highly-paid, smartly-dresse...

The greatest advertising campaigns in American history If you’ve ever watched the hit American TV series Mad Men, you’ll know how important and influential advertising campaigns were back in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, in the agencies of Madison Avenue in New York, highly-paid, smartly-dressed executives created remarkable advertisements for newspapers, billboards and glossy magazines which persuaded (or tricked!) millions of Americans into buying a wide range of cars, soft drinks, perfumes, clothes, and, well, just about everything else. In fact, the brand image of many of today’s most successful products was developed back in those days, and the marketing techniques that were used then are still used today. In order to put together this article, two leading experts on the history of advertising have been asked to name the ad campaigns that have had the greatest impact in the US. Amazingly, they agreed on a top two. In second place they came up with the advertising campaign for a hair colour product from the American company Clairol. It was called Miss Clairol. When it was launched in 1956, the idea of colouring your hair wasn’t very popular with American women. However, the famous advertising executive Shirley Polykoff changed all that by producing advertisements with the slogan, Does she … or doesn’t she? It was an intriguing question and one which implied that if you used Miss Clairol, nobody would know whether your hair had been dyed or not. Suddenly, colouring your hair became a craze in America. Millions of bottles of Miss Clairol were sold and revenues went from $25 million annually to over $200 million. Even today, Clairol continues to be the world’s biggest manufacturer of hair colour products. In first place is an advertising campaign from sixty years ago which had a slogan which is still remembered and used today. At that time, De Beers, the world’s largest diamond-producing company, wanted people to buy more diamond rings. New deposits of diamonds had been discovered in South Africa, so lots of diamond rings, necklaces and bracelets were being made, but very few people were buying them. The story goes that one night a young executive who was working late in the office found a picture in a magazine of a couple who were in love. Suddenly, she had an idea – a moment of inspiration. On the picture she wrote A diamond is forever – and that became the slogan for the campaign. Sales of diamonds rocketed, and today diamonds remain the most popular gemstone for engagement rings.