There are some advertising campaigns that we will never get out of our collective minds, whether we want to or not. Who can forget that little old lady asking Wheres The Beef? I cant for the life of me remember what burger outfit was being pushed but that is the main problem with advertising in general. Advertising campaigns suffer from over-saturation of ads and television commercials on our public psyche. We tend to zone out when we see commercials because we are inundated with them on a daily, hourly, and minute by minute basis, three hundred and sixty five days a year, seven days a week.
But some commercials and advertising campaigns are hard to forget because they were so timely that they became part of the fabric of our lives and live on in the annals of pop culture. Many of you are too young to remember this unless you watched all the retro shows and commercials on Nick at Nite, but one song that I will never get out of my brain is Id Like to Teach the World to Sing which was the theme song for Coca-Cola back in the early 70s. The commercial featured hundreds of people on a scenic mountain top all singing together and holding hands. After the initial overwhelmingly positive response from focus groups and then the general worldwide public, Coke expanded the commercial and spun off several incarnations of it.
Sometimes these advertising campaigns make not only the product famous, but the actor who is hired to perform in them. Rodney Allen Rippy was just such a child star. I cant quite remember what he was selling. It was either Burger King or Beefaroni, not sure which, but he definitely hit the big time. Many future movie stars began their careers as actors on commercials.
Sometimes ad campaigns are effective through their use of bleak humor or ability to deliver a particularly dark message. That was the case with the anti-drug campaign from the 80s that said This is Your Brain. This is Your Brain on Drugs and showed a frying pan with an egg in it. That was some powerful metaphor and I am sure that more than one young person thought twice about using illegal drugs because of that. These types of PSAs, or Public Service Announcements can be very effective. Over the years there have been many of them, none more deliberate or crafty than the old Native American chief looking out over the polluted waters and shores of the Hudson and shedding a single tear.
Ad campaigns begin in the fertile imaginations of Creative Directors, Graphic Designers, Copywriters, and Advertising Executives around the world. We have them to thank for the proliferation of these mind-numbing, sixty second shows that seem to fade into oblivion so quickly.