Decade
1920s ads
The best ads of the 1920s, from Listerine's "Often a Bridesmaid" and Burma-Shave's roadside verses to Macy's first Thanksgiving parade.
All ads
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1929The Pause That Refreshes
Launched in 1929, months before the Depression, "The pause that refreshes" sold five cents of syrup and water as a daily ritual of restoration — a…
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Torches of FreedomLucky Strike (American Tobacco Company)1929
Torches of Freedom
At New York's Easter Parade in 1929 a handful of young women lit cigarettes on Fifth Avenue and called them "torches of freedom", a gesture for…
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Nord ExpressNord Express (Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits and partner railways)1927
Nord Express
No passengers, no scenery, no destination: Cassandre's poster for the Nord Express, the international express linking London and Paris with…
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1926They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano
One of the most imitated headlines in advertising began as a mail-order ad for piano lessons by post.
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1925Often a Bridesmaid but Never a Bride
The ad that turned bad breath into a medical condition.
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Within this vale / of toil / and sin / your head grows bald / but not your chin — Burma-ShaveBurma-Shave1925
Burma-Shave Roadside Verses
America's first great media invention: sequential storytelling at driving speed.
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1925Citroën on the Eiffel Tower
On 4 July 1925, during the Paris decorative-arts exposition, the Eiffel Tower came alive with an animated light show that ended by spelling CITROËN…
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1925The Goodyear Blimp
An airship built for a different dream became one of advertising's most recognisable media.
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1924Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
A department store's Christmas sales push that became a national holiday ritual.
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Nowhere else but Mossel'prom!Mossel'prom1923
Mossel'prom Cooking Oil: Nowhere Else but Mossel'prom
What happens when the avant-garde lands an advertising account.
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1923Somewhere West of Laramie
In 1923 car advertising meant specifications and prices.
Advertising in the 1920s
The 1920s entries show advertisers inventing new places for a message to live. Burma-Shave spread comic verses across serial roadside signs paced to the speed of a passing car, Goodyear turned its airship into a flying billboard, Citroën spelled its name down the Eiffel Tower in lights, and Macy's staged a parade on Thanksgiving morning to open the Christmas shopping season.
Print copy learned to work on hopes and anxieties. Listerine turned bad breath into a medical condition through the story of Edna, "often a bridesmaid but never a bride". John Caples's headline They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano staged a humiliation and promised the reversal. Somewhere West of Laramie left out the engine, the price and the features to sell a car as a feeling of youth, speed and open country.
Design moved forward too. Cassandre's Nord Express reduced a train journey to a towering locomotive and became a defining image of Art Deco travel advertising, and in Moscow, Rodchenko and Mayakovsky bent revolutionary design to plain salesmanship for Mossel'prom.
The decade ends with a warning. Edward Bernays's Torches of Freedom stunt for Lucky Strike borrowed a social cause, without disclosure, to sell cigarettes, and it is still taught as the textbook pseudo-event.