El Toro de Osborne (The Osborne Bull)

Why it works

A giant black bull standing alone on a Spanish hilltop, with not a word written on it. In 1956 the sherry house Osborne asked the Madrid agency Azor to advertise its Veterano brandy along the nation's roads, and Azor's art director Manolo Prieto drew a bull in silhouette, which the client first rejected as better suited to a cattle ranch. The first board, made of wood, went up beside the Madrid–Burgos road in 1957. Road laws pushed the bulls further back, so they grew to around 14 metres, and in 1988 the brand lettering was painted out. When the government ordered their removal in 1994, a public outcry led Congress to defend them as cultural and artistic heritage, and in 1997 the Supreme Court let them stay. It is studied as the advertisement that outlived its message: a mark so simple, and so well placed, that it became landscape and then national emblem. In 2003 Spain's FAD design association named it the icon of the Spanish 20th century.