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Entity's guide to 4 ad campaigns that changed American culture.

In 2006, CBS reported that the average person is exposed to around 5,000 advertisements per day. Though the number has likely fluctuated in the ten years since then, the fact remains that our sheer exposoure to ads has been steadily increasing for decades, particularly with the introduction of social media and the internet. In a media saturated environment, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for advertisers to innovate or have a profound impact on culture. Four brands buck this trend, however, and their ads have found there way into the public consciousness at a grand scale.

1. Nike: “Just Do It”

The very first Nike “Just Do It” ad ran in 1988, and the words haven’t left the brand’s vocabulary ever since. Nike celebrated the 25th anniversary of the ad in 2013 with a commercial voiced by Bradley Cooper and featuring some of our generation’s greatest athletes, such as LeBron James and Serena Williams. The ad was a reminder of just what made the “Just Do It” campaign so iconic in the first place. If you could just do “it” you could do anything. It inspires and reinforces the company’s mission statement: “Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world. *If you have a body, you are an athlete.”

The “Just Do It” campaign came at a time when Nike had lost it’s place as the top sportswear company; according to Jerome Conlon, who worked on the initial “Just Do It” campaign, Nike was worried about losing customers to Reebok, who had managed to engage female customers in a way Nike hadn’t. Nike’s response was to create an ad campaign that could inspire anyone, anywhere. Once the “Just Do It” campaign launched, Nike saw a huge, immediate turn around, with sales increasing one thousand percent over ten years, and their slogan etched into the fabric of American culture.

2. California Milk Processor Board: “got milk?”

Research done by Adweek shows that “got milk?” is the most remembered tagline from any beverage advertisement, which should come as a shock to know one. Just reading the words “got milk?” likely brings an image of one of your favorite celebrities, posing with the iconic milk mustache and a glass of milk. The ads ran for twenty years until they were retired in 2014, but the simple phrase “got milk?” has become ingrained as a part of American culture.

The ad has been parodied and copied a multitude of times, most recently in Fergie’s new single “M.I.L.F. $”. One of the creators of the slogan, Jeff Goodby, spoke of it’s resonance in an interview with Time magazine: “It’s a truth […] ‘Got milk?’ is an acknowledgement that milk is essential, and if you don’t have it, then something is missing.” Though the milk industry hasn’t seen much growth, the high profile nature and celebrity endorsements became part of a larger conversation of health and nutrition that continues to this day.

3. Old Spice: “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”

The first commercial featuring “the Old Spice man” (played by actor Isaiah Mustafa) aired in 2010, when Old Spice found themselves with less than enthusiastic sales numbers. The commercial – which you’ve likely seen, along with the various spin-offs – was one of the first to go viral in the modern environment of the internet, and was one of the first to utilize emerging social media platforms to engage with customers.

It was a campaign that worked: within three months of the advertisement first airing, Old Spice sales were reportedly up fifty five percent. What made the Old Spice commercial a success was that the company had shifted from marketing to just men to marketing to men and women. Research done by the company found that largely, it was women who were buying bath products such as soap and body wash, and that men were just using whatever happened to be laying around. Old Spice then had to figure out a way to market to women a product that was branded for men, without alienating men who didn’t live with women or who purchased their own body care products.

The result was the “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercial, which poked fun at the advertising industry and masculinity, while also opening the clip with “hello ladies”. The commercial was wildly popular, prompting Old Spice to do a two-day long power session across various social media platforms, where the Old Spice man replied to customer comments in real time with personalized videos which were uploaded to YouTube. Even Ellen Degeneres got a video, where the Old Spice man informs her he’s been crowned king of Latvia. In 2010, people were just becoming connected through the various social media platforms, and companies were scrambling to incorporate social media into their marketing strategies. Old Spice managed to create an easy, simple marketing strategy, that worked so well that other companies – and even Hollywood, such as when Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson recorded videos for fans earlier this year to promote their film Central Intelligence – have since adopted it.

4. Dove: Real Beauty

Though the “Real Beauty” campaign has sparked backlash as more information about its production process came to light, the campaign started a national conversation that has refused to die down. It’s ushered in and inspired age of advertisements dedicated to celebrating girls and women, such as Always “#LikeAGirl” campaign, or Aerie’s “Real” campaign, which solely features unretouched images.

The campaign came into being after Dove’s parent company, Unilever, found that only 4% of women in their research pool considered themselves beautiful. The response was Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, which featured an array of billboards and videos, each designed to deconstruct norms of what it means for a woman to be beautiful. In doing so, the brand was able to resonate with women from all walks of life, and sparked a national dialogue on what beauty means. Dove and Unilever claim that the campaign was about more than just rebranding; in an interview Sharon MacLeod, the vice president of Unilever North America Personal Care, told the Huffington Post “we’re going to try to change a generation. You have to wait until they grow up to see what happens.” The impact of the campaign has been profound, and although Dove and Unilever haven’t released any numbers, the slew of similar campaigns and the growing strength of the body positivity movement speak to the “Real Beauty” campaign’s impact.

 

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