Monday 19 October 2015

Great Minds

60 years of TV advertising have recently been celebrated back in Blighty, with the first ever TV commercial - for Gibbs SR toothpaste - airing in September, 1955.

To celebrate, Marketing magazine has run a vote to find out the public's favourite ad from the last 60 years, and the marketing and advertising industry's choice. The results can be seen here.

No huge surprises, maybe, with Cadbury's 'Gorilla' carrying off the top slot for the public, Guinness' 'Surfer' from 1999 being voted No. 1 by Marketing readers, and 'Compare the Market' bagging second place for both groups.

What I find most interesting, as you scroll down the lists for both groups, vision bouncing off the usual suspects, old favourites and happy memories, is the similarity between the two lists. To some extent, this is inevitable, given the methodology (the public chose from a list, which had been generated via suggestions made on social media). But, apart from Smash 'Martians' on the public list and BT 'Maureen Lipman' on the marketeers', the same ads crop up in both.

What all these ads have in common is that they evoke a reaction in the viewer - you laugh, smile, giggle, think, wonder, maybe even cry. None of them are purely about pushing information into your brain or moving you along the attention-interest-desire-action customer decision journey.

They are all made by humans, for humans. And maybe that's the best pre-test of all - we probably know better than we think, through instinct, what makes for good advertising.

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