Surreal Gold Pack Posters

Why it works

Posters with no people, no slogan and almost no words, just a gold pack hidden inside a baffling picture. In 1977 Collett Dickenson Pearce abandoned its much-imitated Gold Box work for Gallaher's Benson & Hedges and, facing government rules that left little it could show or say about the product, art director Alan Waldie proposed Magritte-like visual riddles. Brian Duffy photographed the first, a pack beside a mousehole; later classics included Neil Godfrey and Jimmy Wormser's 'Pyramids', shot on location in Egypt. Waldie's logic was that the harder a poster was to decode, the longer people would stand and look at it. By the 1980s some executions showed no intact pack at all, leaving the government health warning as the only copy. It is studied as a landmark of British art direction and of creativity forced by regulation; the V&A, which holds printer's proofs from the campaign, says it stretched the boundaries of advertising photography, and the History of Advertising Trust keeps Waldie's archive.