Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking (torture tests)

Why it works

For two decades from 1956, former NBC anchorman John Cameron Swayze put Timex watches through televised ordeals: strapped to a cliff diver, attacked with a jackhammer, tossed in a dishwasher, fixed to the pontoon of a landing seaplane, stomped by elephants. Then he held each one to the camera, still running, and delivered the verdict: "Takes a licking and keeps on ticking." Some tests went out live, and the risk was the point. On The Steve Allen Show one watch vanished from an outboard-motor propeller in a water tank, and Swayze calmly promised viewers they would see it next time. The campaign is studied as the archetype of the torture-test demonstration, and of lending a newsman's credibility to a cheap, durable product. Timex sales passed five million by 1958, and by the end of the decade one in three watches sold in the United States was a Timex. Ad Age ranked the campaign No. 40 of the 20th century.