The PG Tips Chimps

Why it works

In 1956 Brooke Bond began dressing chimpanzees in human clothes for its PG Tips commercials, borrowing the idea from the chimps' tea parties at London Zoo. It became one of the longest-running campaigns in British television, ending only in 2002. The chimps, trained at Twycross Zoo, were lip-synced to the voices of stars including Peter Sellers, and graduated to sitcom roles such as the piano-shifting Mr Shifter ("You hum it, son, I'll play it"). The campaign is studied as a textbook of brand-building through affection: a spectacle only television could deliver, wrapped in parochial British humour, with the product mentioned often but never oversold. PG Tips was fourth in its market when the chimps arrived; within two years it had overtaken Typhoo for first place, and by 1977 it held 26 per cent of the British tea market. Today the campaign is also revisited critically, with Twycross Zoo, which supplied the animals, saying their use was wrong.