Decade
1950s ads
The best ads of the 1950s, from Ogilvy's Hathaway man and the Marlboro Man to Timex's torture tests and Volkswagen's "Think Small".
All ads
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1959You're Never Alone with a Strand (The Lonely Man)
A lone man in a trench coat, hat pushed back Sinatra-style, lights a cigarette on a rain-soaked London street at night while a mournful theme plays:…
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1959Think Small
The ad that started advertising's creative revolution.
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1958"At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock"
The most famous headline in advertising — and Ogilvy didn't write it.
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1957Louie the Fly
A gravel-voiced cartoon gangster fly boasts about spreading disease and fears no one except the man with the can of Mortein.
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1957Does She... or Doesn't She?
A double entendre that destigmatized an entire product category.
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1956Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking (torture tests)
For two decades from 1956, former NBC anchorman John Cameron Swayze put Timex watches through televised ordeals: strapped to a cliff diver, attacked…
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1956The PG Tips Chimps
In 1956 Brooke Bond began dressing chimpanzees in human clothes for its PG Tips commercials, borrowing the idea from the chimps' tea parties at…
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1956El Toro de Osborne (The Osborne Bull)
A giant black bull standing alone on a Spanish hilltop, with not a word written on it.
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Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country.Marlboro (Philip Morris)1955
The Marlboro Man
The most consequential repositioning in advertising history — studied today as both masterwork and warning.
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1955The Guinness Book of Records
A pub-argument settler that became one of the best-selling books in history.
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1953The Hamm's Bear
A clumsy, good-natured cartoon bear tumbles off a rolling log, plays hockey, fishes and fumbles his way around the North Woods while a tom-tom beat…
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The man in the Hathaway shirt.C.F. Hathaway1951
The Man in the Hathaway Shirt
A 50-cent drugstore eyepatch that built an agency empire.
Advertising in the 1950s
Television commercials join the mix in the 1950s, but print still carries some of the decade's most influential work.
David Ogilvy made his name in print. The Man in the Hathaway Shirt added a drugstore eyepatch to give an ordinary shirt ad "story appeal", and his Rolls-Royce ad set a headline about the electric clock, found in a magazine review, over long and factual copy. Leo Burnett relaunched Marlboro around the cowboy, a case now taught both as proof that advertising sells identity and as an ethics warning. Shirley Polykoff's "Does she... or doesn't she?" took the stigma out of hair colour for Clairol.
The television entries lean on characters and live spectacle. In Takes a Licking, Timex strapped its watches to cliff divers and attacked them with jackhammers, with some of the tests broadcast live. The Hamm's Bear took a regional beer onto national television, Brooke Bond dressed chimpanzees in human clothes for PG Tips, and Mortein made the pest itself the star with Louie the Fly. Strand is the warning: a famous, much-loved ad for a cigarette almost nobody bought.
The decade closes with Think Small, Doyle Dane Bernbach's honest, self-deprecating Volkswagen ad, which is studied as the start of advertising's creative revolution.