Winning Ad Campaigns

American Demographics, April 1, 2003

Byline: MATTHEW GRIMM

Ads are ads. They're not art or philosophy or anything approaching the transcendent capacities of man. But occasionally, the right person or team at the right company brings the right product to the right agency, and together they put their finger on the pulse of something bigger. Although a lot of wacky ads flash in the proverbial pan and score big recall numbers a month after the Super Bowl, communications programs that do more-that speak to their audiences with words they not only understand but also want to hear, that move the cultural needle, that work-are few and far between. In identifying the best efforts of the past 25 years, let's start with the last criterion, basically efforts that sold their products and their companies. Naturally, a few come to mind-VW's New Beetle launch, Miller Lite's "Great Taste, Less Filling," Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" But culling my shortlist, I singled out the works that did more, that addressed the genuine issues on the minds of the target demographic and, in some cases, also became a catalyst for those issues. The following five campaigns are bellwether as much as advertising, composing a sort of shorthand cultural road map through the last quarter century.

Levi Strauss & Co., 1984-1988: "501 Blues"

Seeing the launch spot for Levi's Type 1 jeans reminded me of the company's 501 campaign, not for any similarities but for how far the company has strayed. The new ad, showing a heroin-addict-scrawny model weeping while a herd of buffalo stampedes past her amid a sprawling, emptied cityscape, seemed the kind of abstract expression only a Europhilic fashion wag could appreciate. "501 Blues," on the other hand, was as American as American could be, in all the best, populist, street-level notions of the term.

Unscripted and shot by San Francisco agency Foote Cone & Belding, the spots sold the basic, straight-legged jeans not as an "aspirational badge" but as the simple stuff of life. Real people, not models, danced dopey and devil-may-care in real, dirty streets and futzed over relationships, all intercut with name and no-name musicians singing original tunes-blues, doo-wop, rock, country. The only common denominator was the mention of the brand name.

The campaign showed another America, one far from the realms of power ties and LBOs. This, after all, was where jeans lived, among the great unwashed (as it were). Levi's had been one of the defining adornments of the youth culture that had broken off from the sterile mass culture of the '50s. "501 Blues" reestablished Levi Strauss's connection with that singular catalyst of that youthful schism, American music, and its polyglot casting, featuring people of all colors, subtly recalled the cross-racial fusion rock 'n' roll had affected in those decades past. "501 Blues" also became the company's spiritual compass, reinstating the Levi's brand as the fabric of Americana while never putting on airs or talking down to its market. "Blues" propelled the 501 brand sales to a 20 percent increase in 1984, though the company's overall sales remained flat. The turnaround lifted all boats the next year, as 501 sales jumped 50 percent in 1985 and sales for Levi's jeans division climbed 7.1 percent, to $1.5 billion.

Nike, 1987-1991: "Spike & Mike"

One could cite any number of Nike ad campaigns as candidates for this list: "Bo Knows," "Just Do It," et al. But as the company came off a horrific 1986, when sales plummeted to $877 million, from $1.1 billion, it was two bracing black-and-white spots that helped Nike turn a corner, fundamentally changed the way it spoke to consumers and helped introduce an urban aesthetic into mass culture.

"Yo! Mars Blackmon here, with my main man Michael Jordan"-for a few years, this became the opening line to rare laugh-out-loud advertising, as intoned by Spike Lee as Mars Blackmon, reprising the ever-yapping geek character from his film She's Gotta Have It. Lee played a Jordan fan to the point of psychosis, as the ascendant superstar went about his breathtaking dunks in desolate gyms. A later spot brought in an aeronautics professor, and its genius is simply Mars's wide-eyed reactions as the former explains: "Michael Jordan overcomes the acceleration of gravity by the application of his muscle power in the vertical plane, thus producing a low-altitude Earth orbit."

Spike & Mike "set a new standard for what we expected at Nike, that ads should be intelligent, creative in terms of production value, but also clued in to contemporary culture," says Scott Bedbury, who was Nike's ad director during that campaign. "What you were seeing by then was the rise of urban culture, a street culture that seemed so at ease with itself, so confident, so true ... and it's no coincidence those things became fundamental to our brand identity."

Jordan's star power and Mars's street cred revved that engine. They seemed to bring a distinct African American voice, as unique and wiggy as Lee's and as dignified as Jordan's, to the mainstream market, to a point where it would never be the same again (see Sprite, below). Along the way, the campaign righted the Nike ship: Sales rebounded to $1.2 billion in 1988, per Hoover's business data, then boomed to $1.7 billion, $2.2 billion and $3 billion in the next three years. Its creative momentum made Nike the most ubiquitous brand in sports, growing to a 43 percent market share in 1998 from 18 percent only 10 years earlier.