99 44/100% Pure (“It Floats”)

Ivory Soap (Procter & Gamble)1882

99 44/100% Pure (“It Floats”) is an 1882 print advertising campaign (press ads and posters) for Ivory Soap.

1898 chromolithograph poster headed “You need only one soap — Ivory Soap”: a man in a red shirt stands in a stream outside a tent washing with a bar of Ivory floating beside him, above the words “Pure — First quality, Not expensive, Will wash anything, No chapping” and “It Floats” See the original
Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons — public domain

The line

99 44/100% Pure

Why it works

Ivory is the textbook case of a brand built on one oddly exact promise. In 1882 chemists' analyses found that just 56/100 of one per cent of Procter & Gamble's white soap was anything but pure soap; Harley Procter subtracted that from a hundred and the slogan “99 44/100% pure” was born, first advertised that year in The Independent, a weekly. Paired with “It floats” (the result of a factory batch accidentally whipped full of air), the claim ran for more than a century across magazines, newspapers and posters such as this 1898 Strobridge lithograph. It is studied because the fraction made purity sound measured rather than boasted, and because P&G kept the same positioning while everything around it changed; David Aaker opens the first chapter of Managing Brand Equity with the Ivory story, noting an “aggressive” 1882 ad budget of $11,000. P&G donated its Ivory advertising archive to the Smithsonian, and Ad Age ranked the campaign No. 16 of the century.

Techniques

  • Logos An oddly exact purity figure, derived from chemists' analyses, makes the soap's quality sound measured rather than boasted.

Sources · 3

  1. Ivory Soap Advertising Collection Smithsonian Institution — Archives Center, National Museum of American History · si.edu
  2. Sample text for Managing brand equity : capitalizing on the value of a brand name / David A. Aaker. Library of Congress (publisher's sample of David A. Aaker, Managing Brand Equity, Free Press, 1991) · catdir.loc.gov
  3. Ad Age Advertising Century: The Top 100 Campaigns Ad Age (1999) · adage.com

Updated

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