Decade
1960s ads
The best ads of the 1960s, from DDB's Avis and Volkswagen work to Alka-Seltzer's "Spicy Meatball" and the "Daisy" political ad.
All ads
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1969Funeral
A procession of limousines heads to a funeral while the dead man, Maxwell E.
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1969Spicy Meatball
A commercial inside a commercial: an actor shooting a spot for fictional "Magadini's" meatballs blows take after take — "Mamma mia, that's a spicy…
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Legoland BillundLEGO1968
Legoland Billund
By the mid-1960s about 20,000 people a year were turning up at the LEGO factory in Billund, a small town in Jutland, to look at its model displays,…
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1966The Disadvantages
A rapid sequence of two-second black-and-white vignettes in which smokers discover all the awkward ways an extra-long cigarette gets in the way of…
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1966The Amul Girl Topicals ("Utterly Butterly Delicious")
Since 1966 a small girl in a polka-dot dress has been commenting on the news from Amul's billboards.
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1964Snow Plow
A Beetle ploughs through thigh-deep drifts while an unhurried narrator asks a question nobody had thought to ask: "Have you ever wondered how the…
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1964Daisy ("Peace, Little Girl")
The most famous political ad ever made aired exactly once.
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1964The Pirelli Calendar
In 1964 Pirelli's British subsidiary, looking for a way to stand out from local tyre rivals, hired art director Derek Forsyth and Beatles…
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Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So we try harder.Avis1963
We Try Harder ("Avis is only No. 2")
The founding document of underdog positioning.
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Tokyo 1964Tokyo 1964 Olympic Games Organising Committee1962
The Start of the Sprinters' Dash (Tokyo 1964)
Six sprinters explode off the line against pure black, with the Olympic rings and "TOKYO 1964" in gold beneath.
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You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's.Levy's (Henry S. Levy & Sons)1961
You Don't Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy's
A Brooklyn bakery wanted New Yorkers of every background to buy its rye, so Doyle Dane Bernbach put them on the subway walls.
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Punt e MesCarpano (Punt e Mes)1960
Punt e Mes
Punt e Mes is Piedmontese for 'a point and a half', named, legend says, after a Turin stockbroker's order for vermouth with half a measure of bitter…
Advertising in the 1960s
Much of the 1960s work here belongs to the creative revolution that Doyle Dane Bernbach started with Volkswagen. DDB's style was plain, witty and honest about weakness. Avis admitted it was only No. 2 and turned the confession into a reason to choose it, and Levy's subway posters put New Yorkers of every background on the walls under the line "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's". On television, Snow Plow and Funeral carried the same voice into Volkswagen's commercials.
Wells Rich Greene took the same spirit to cigarettes, launching Benson & Hedges 100's by cheerfully listing the disadvantages of a longer cigarette. Spicy Meatball, made at the height of the revolution, turned advertising itself into the joke, though viewers remembered the fake meatball brand as readily as the antacid.
Television also showed its power in politics. Daisy aired once and never named Barry Goldwater, yet the networks replayed it on the news, and it is studied as the foundation of modern political advertising, built on fear and implication rather than argument.
Beyond the United States, the entries show other routes to fame: Armando Testa turning the name Punt e Mes into a sphere above a half-sphere, Yusaku Kamekura's photographic poster for the Tokyo 1964 Olympics, the Amul girl's topical puns on Indian hoardings, and a Pirelli calendar that was never put on sale.