Lets start with the campaign that solidified Bernbach's reputation, the little car that could. This campaign was up against quite a lot, at the time American cars were big by definition and Americans simply didn't buy small imported cars. Bernbach had to overcome market prejudice, and they did this by taking it head on with honesty and cleverness. They positioned the product as unique and turned a shortcoming into a selling point and carved out a very nice market niche.
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| Apple: Think Different - Bill Bernbach |
Apple took a very similar note with their Think Different campaign. In the 1990s Apple was suffering from lackluster performance and a significantly diminished brand image. With a simple and quirky slogan and a tribute to some of the greatest independent thinkers in history, this campaign greatly revived their counter-culture image. One of those immortalized in this campaign was Bill Bernbach himself, which I thought was a nice nod to the VW campaign.
A post discussing advertising campaigns wouldn't be complete without referencing a beer slogan, so lets get this out of the way, "Tastes Great... Less Filling" echoed through a generation (or two?) running from the early 1970s into the 2000s. Miller Lite hit a gold mine with this one, thanks to the ad agency McCann-Erickson Worldwide. The challenge here was similar to the problem VW faced, there was a market prejudice against light beer, a belief that it didn't taste good and that it wasn't masculine. They confronted the notion that it didn't taste good with the comedic tug of war between between fans preferring the taste vs. the low calories, and used a wide array of sports heroes and celebrities to change the non-masculine prejudice.
Lets get real simple here... milk, do you have any? Practically every California resident knows this question well... hell, sometimes I stop and ask myself this for no good reason at all. The primary challenge here was to combat declining consumption and the campaign was met with rapid success, within the first year California saw a 7% increase in consumption and the trend held steady while on the national level milk consumption continued to decline. And beyond simple sales success, this campaign has to be responsible for the largest number of spin offs and internet memes of just about any ad slogan, and what true measure of success do we have in this age of the internet if not the prevalence of memes? Got memes?
I couldn't end this post without a little controversy, so what about one of the most iconic brand mascots of all time, the good ole' Marlboro man. This campaign is now as hated as it was successful, launching it's product to be the most widely smoked brand of cigarette in the world. The message in the various advertisements was inconsequential to this campaign, it was all about the man. The Marlboro man represented the American cowboy, he radiates masculinity and nostalgia to Americans and everything stereotypically American to the rest of the world. And ironically, this is one icon that came back to bite the hand that fed it when David McLean, who appeared appeared in the 1970s as the Marlboro man, later developed emphysema, became an outspoken ant-smoking advocate and eventually died of lung cancer.
References:
Top 100 Ad Campaigns of the Century - Adage.com
Top Ad Campaigns of the 20th Century - CNBC.com
Best Ad Campaigns of All Time - Infographic
10 Greatest Marketing Campaigns of All Time
Tribute to Apple Think Different Campaign - Creative Criminals
Volkswagen ad campaign was far from a lemon - Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal
Got Milk? - A Case Study
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