Twenty Ads That Shook the World: The Century's Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All

There are all kinds of cool stories in this breezy book: how Anacin's $8,200 TV spot depicting a hammer in the headache sufferer's head earned $36 million; how Coke remade Santa literally in its own artist's image; how LBJ beat Goldwater partly because of a single 30-second ad featuring a girl resembling the murder victim in Frankenstein plucking and counting daisy petals while an announcer counts down to a nuclear blast that reminded voters of Goldwater's speeches about nuking Vietnam and made them forget the war was LBJ's fault in the first place. --Tim Appelo

Product Description
James Twitchell takes an in-depth look at the ads and ad campaigns—and their creators—that have most influenced our culture and marketplace in the twentieth century. P. T. Barnum’s creation of buzz, Pepsodent and the magic of the preemptive claim, Listerine introducing America to the scourge of halitosis, Nike’s “Just Do It,” Clairol’s “Does She or Doesn’t She?,” Leo Burnett’s invention of the Marlboro Man, Revlon’s Charlie Girl, Coke’s re-creation of Santa Claus, Absolut and the art world—these campaigns are the signposts of a century of consumerism, our modern canon understood, accepted, beloved, and hated the world over.

The book talks about a lot of different types of ads, including some very old ones such as for Pear's Soap. That was particularly interesting to a layperson such as myself.

However, it didn't cover Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" or anything from Alka-Seltzer, both of which are very memorable - and the Wendy's ad cropped up during a Reagan-Mondale debate in 1984!

I would also have liked to have seen some more recent trends covered, such as the MTV style of advertising, or the ironic/nasty ads (e. g. for rental cars companies that show accidents).

A good read, but could use a makeover.


Fascinating   January 8, 2001
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20 ads from the last century which are fascinating to examine. Each may appear simple on the surface, but as Twitchell closely analyses these ads he reveals that they are profound in nature. As a museum of art has great pictures, a museum of advertising would include these 20 profound ads. These are ads which even today stand out as great successful works of advertising even though the product they advertised may no longer exist. These ads not only sell, but they changed the way we sell things. They are groundbreaking. There's the 1962 ad that made a small Volkswagen Beetle look better than a large Oldsmobile or Buick or Dodge. There's the 1942 advertisement that got commuters to stop complaining about the lousy passenger railroad service. There's the very successful and long running ad campaign that gave the attribute of flight to ordinary tennis shoes. There's advertising campaign that made an ordinary toothpaste a best seller, and the advertising campaign that took an ordinary shirt and made it special. There's the advertising campaign that gently shepherded our society so consumers to pay a large sum of money for a gemstone, and the advertising campaign that gently guided our society into accepting a radically new product.

Twitchell analyses them all. I found it fascinating.