Classic TV Commercials

Here’s a few of my favorite TV commercials.

The spots you are probably thinking of

Most people do not want an archive, they want one particular commercial they have not seen since childhood. These are the ones that come up most often, with a working link to each.

Life cereal — “Mikey likes it”. Two brothers push the bowl to the little one on the theory that he hates everything.

Mennen Skin Bracer — “Thanks, I needed that”. The slap to the face after the aftershave. A single line of dialogue that ran, in one form or another, for the better part of thirty years.

Renuzit — the fried fish spot, 1974. The boss is coming to dinner and the house smells of fried fish. Wild Rose scent solves it. The line people remember is the panic about last night’s cooking, not the product name, which tells you something about how the spot was built.

Slinky. “Everyone knows it’s Slinky.” One of the longest-running jingles in the history of American television, and a lesson in not changing something that works.

Alka-Seltzer — “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”, 1972. Sixty seconds, two people, one bed, and no demonstration of anything.

Wendy’s — “Where’s the beef?”, 1984. Clara Peller. The rare case of a catchphrase escaping the commercial entirely and turning up in a presidential campaign.

McDonald’s — the Big Mac song, 1974. Two all-beef patties and everything after them, sung fast. A contest gave you a free Big Mac for reciting the list inside four seconds, which is why people can still do it fifty years on. The audience did the repeating, not the media buy.

Coca-Cola — “Hey kid, catch” with Mean Joe Greene, 1979. Preserved by the Museum of Classic Chicago Television. Sixty seconds, almost no dialogue, and the product does not appear until the story is already working.

Memorex — “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” with Ella Fitzgerald. A product demonstration disguised as a party trick.

Palmolive — “You’re soaking in it”. Jan Miner as Madge the manicurist, who played the part for twenty-seven years.

Charmin — “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin”, 1964–1985. Dick Wilson played Mr. Whipple in 504 commercials across twenty-one years, shooting roughly sixteen days a year and turning down other commercial work to keep the character exclusive.

Tootsie Pop — “How many licks?”, around 1969. Still running more than fifty years later, essentially untouched. The brand only commissioned a remake in 2025, which makes this close to the cheapest creative in American television.

Coca-Cola — “I’d like to buy the world a Coke”, 1971. McCann Erickson. The first shoot was abandoned and done again in Italy at a cost past $250,000, and Coca-Cola then received more than a hundred thousand letters about it.

The Energizer Bunny, 1988. It exists because Duracell let its own drumming-rabbit trademark lapse in the United States. The two settled in 1992 by splitting the world between them. The gag — a fake commercial interrupted — bought the brand a second impression inside its own pod.

LifeCall — “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up”, 1989. The line comfortably outlived the advertiser. LifeCall was out of business by 1993.

Dunkin’ Donuts — “Time to make the donuts”, 1981–1997. Michael Vale played Fred the Baker in more than 1,300 spots. When Dunkin’ retired him it surveyed customers on how to do it, then served six million people on the day.

Oscar Mayer — the boy on the pier, 1974. J. Walter Thompson. The finished spot was an accident: with time left at the end of a shoot the director asked whether any of the children could sing it straight through, and a four-year-old did it in one take.

Apple — “1984”. Chiat/Day, directed by Ridley Scott. The agency bought one late-night spot on a small Idaho station on 31 December 1983 purely so it qualified for that year’s awards. Its only national airing was the Super Bowl three weeks later. Apple’s board hated it.

Maxell — the man in the chair, 1981. It began as a two-page magazine spread rather than a commercial, and the man was never cast. The model did not turn up, so they put the makeup artist in the chair.

The California Raisins, 1986. Foote, Cone & Belding with Will Vinton’s stop-motion. Sales rose about twenty per cent, then the economics turned: by 1994 the growers had concluded the marketing cost more than the raisins earned, and the board dissolved.

Chiffon — “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature”, 1977. Dena Dietrich played Mother Nature for eight years on one repeated beat: she tastes it, she is told, she answers with thunder. Same setup, same payoff, most of a decade.

Timex — “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking”. John Cameron Swayze fronted the torture tests for about twenty years, shot live. In 1958 a watch came loose from an outboard motor on air and he ad-libbed that it was presumably still ticking at the bottom of the tank.

The ones that could not run today

Two categories disappeared from American television for reasons that had nothing to do with whether the advertising worked, which makes them unusually interesting to look at.

Cigarettes. Broadcast cigarette advertising was banned in the United States from 2 January 1971, so everything that survives is a closed set. The University of California’s tobacco archive holds a reel of Winston television spots from the late 1950s to 1970, including the “tastes good like a cigarette should” campaign that was scolded for its grammar and kept running anyway, because the scolding sold cigarettes. There is also the Winston compilation featuring the Flintstones, which is the single clearest illustration of how differently the rules read at the time.

Airlines. National Airlines — “I’m Cheryl. Fly me.”, 1971. The campaign was enormously effective, provoked organised opposition from flight attendants, and is now taught as a case study in what a successful campaign can cost a brand later.

Celebrity endorsement, before it was an industry

John Wayne for Great Western Savings, 1977–78. Worth a note on the record: these are frequently remembered as Wells Fargo commercials, but Wayne worked for Great Western, a California savings bank, and the association was strong enough that Great Western put a bronze statue of him outside their Los Angeles headquarters in 1984. If it is genuinely Wells Fargo you are after, their own archive has a browsable collection of 1970s and 1980s advertising.

The endorsements of this period are instructive because the talent was doing very little. Wayne stands in a landscape and talks about California. There is no attempt to make him a character, or to have him pretend to use the product every day. The borrowed credibility does the work, and modern endorsement deals are often far more elaborate to less effect.

AdViews at Duke University

The most valuable of the archives. Thousands of commercials from the D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles agency archive, 1950s to 1980s, digitised from 16mm film. Procter & Gamble, General Foods, IBM, Colgate-Palmolive; Crest, Pampers, Scope. Because it came out of one agency’s own files it is a coherent body of work rather than a scrapbook, and you can watch a single brand’s campaign evolve across two decades.

AdViews at the Duke Digital Repository.

The Internet Archive collections

Large, free, uneven in cataloguing and enormously rewarding to browse. Classic Television Commercials, Part I covers the earliest years from 1948. American TV Commercials, 1960s to 2000s is the broadest single collection, and there is a further general Classic Television Commercials set.

Two more are worth knowing about. Vintage commercials from 1980s and 1990s Saturday mornings were recorded off air with the breaks intact, which is the interesting part — you see the pod as the viewer saw it. Vinnie Rattolle’s uploads are a large and carefully dated private collection.

Local television

The Museum of Classic Chicago Television holds nearly five thousand clips of Chicago-area broadcast, heavy on local commercials, promos and public service announcements from the 1970s and 1980s. Local spots almost never get archived anywhere, which makes this collection unusual and the closest thing we have to a record of what regional television advertising actually looked like.

What holds up, and why

Watch a few hours of this and one thing separates the spots that still work from the ones that do not, and it is not production value. The survivors make a single claim and repeat it without embarrassment across years of media. The forgotten ones are usually more sophisticated, more varied, and were rebuilt every time a new marketing director arrived.

The other thing worth noticing is length. A great deal of the Duke material runs sixty seconds, and it is not padded — the extra time is spent demonstrating something. The move to thirties and fifteens was driven by media cost, not by evidence that shorter persuades better, and an advertiser deciding on unit length today is making a media-buying decision that will be blamed on the creative later. See TV advertising and national TV advertising.

For the radio equivalent, see classic radio jingles.

Berk Marketing represents advertisers, not television stations or media companies. If you are holding a television proposal and want it read against the points that decide it, send it in.