My favourite ads of the decade, number 5=: It’s a Tide Ad.
Does my list have eight ads, or nine? To tell you the truth, in all this confusion I’ve forgotten myself. But being this is a 44-advertising blog, and could blow your head clean off… Hang on… Clean? Is this a Tide ad?
Ever since Lee Clow, Steve Jobs and Apple invented the ‘Superbowl Ad’ in 1983, there’s been intense interest in the commercials that run during America’s biggest TV occasion. It’s where the big clients pay the big budgets to look big in front of the biggest audience.
But in recent years it’s been a bit desperate. Apparently there always has to be a ‘winner’, but it feels a little like the Superbowl advertisers have been going through the motions, with nothing really taking the occasion by the scruff of the neck.
Until 2018.
Yes, only a massive advertiser like P&G could have the resources to pull it off, but look at the crazy shit they bought: an ad that mercilessly skewers the clichés of advertising genres and tropes (many of them used by P&G); an ad that bleeds into ads for other brands; and an ad that pulls the rug out from under you again and again and again.
And the spots are funny. Properly, funniest-ad-of-the-year funny. The team, client and agency didn’t just rest on the cushion of a great, expensive idea; the rammed home excellence in execution, in one spot after another.
So, for dropping a grenade of pure, culture-shifting brilliance into the biggest advertising occasion of the year, it’s one of my favourite ads of the decade, and it’s a Tide ad
Love it, totally brilliant.
But their claim that it was the first brand to take over other Superbowl commercials isn’t strictly accurate. Energiser did it 30 years ago with the bunny starting off in its own ad and then drumming its way through numerous others that the audience believed were for other brands.
But then i only know that because i’m a pedantic old git.
Loving the rundown Ben and completely agree with them all so far. Intrigued to see what makes Nu 1.
Interesting. I had no idea that happened in a Superbowl.
Funnily enough, I saw Energizer happen live when I was on holiday in America. It was a fucking ad on TV and I remember it 30+ years later!
I was blown away as a twelve-year-old… The power of great advertising.
For anyone else intrigued, number one is British…