Twenty Ads That Shook the World: The Century's Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All (Paperback)

~ (Author) "IF AMERICAN LITERATURE, as Ernest Hemingway said, starts with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, then American advertising starts with P. T. Barnum's masterful deceptions..." (more)
Key Phrases: Miss Clairol, Marlboro Man, Michael Jordan (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

James B. Twitchell's celebration of the greatest 20 hits of the U.S. advertising industry shows how a thoughtful consideration of ads can add up to a fascinating social history. From Lydia Pinkham's patent medicines (said to cure all serious "Female Complaints") to Nike shoes worn by Michael Jordan, Twitchell gives us a quickie history of the ads that hit home and transformed our culture--the ones that "really had the beef," as he puts it. Some of the feats are amazing. The dazzling "Diamonds are forever" campaign managed to take not particularly rare rocks and transform them into sacred amulets practically everyone buys and never sells (which would depress their value). The ads brilliantly used honeymoon scenes by famous artists and swoony copy to woo women, while devoting a corner of each ad to fact-packed boxes reassuring men that diamonds were sound investments priced according to scientific principles. The jujitsu-psychology techniques of the VW Bug and Avis "We Try Harder" get their due, as does the "Does She... or Doesn't She?" ad that convinced women they could color their graying hair with Clairol's new one-step technology. The racy innuendo appealed to people fearing loss of appeal; the presence of young daughters in the pictures neutralized the floozy image dyeing used to have, and the line "Only her hairdresser knows for sure" soothed the salons that were about to lose their business once women figured out they could use Clairol at home.

There are all kinds of cool stories in this breezy book: how Anacin's $8,200 TV spot depicting a hammer in the headache sufferer's head earned $36 million; how Coke remade Santa literally in its own artist's image; how LBJ beat Goldwater partly because of a single 30-second ad featuring a girl resembling the murder victim in Frankenstein plucking and counting daisy petals while an announcer counts down to a nuclear blast that reminded voters of Goldwater's speeches about nuking Vietnam and made them forget the war was LBJ's fault in the first place. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

If Twitchell doesn't prove his thesis that these 20 advertisements became part of the lingua franca and changed the way we look at the world, his lavishly illustrated, breezily entertaining survey does score some solid points. The jolly old Santa Claus known from countless images did not spring from folklore, according to Twitchell, but was invented in the 1920s by the Coca-Cola Co. in its annual Christmas ads (pre-Coke Santas were severe-looking and sometimes wore multicolored suits). Ads for Pears's soap, aimed at Victorian England's upper classes, borrowed an artifact of high cultureAa portrait painted by John Everett Millais called "A Child's World"Athus forever blurring the boundary between art and advertising. De Beers Mines' half-century-long campaign helped make diamonds an instrument of romantic love. Twitchell, whose books on advertising include Adcult USA and Carnival Culture, serves up colorful slices of American advertising history, from a P.T. Barnum circus poster (1879) to turn-of-the-last-century patent medicine ads (peddling nonpatented potions heavily laced with alcohol, opium or cocaine) and Lyndon Johnson's 1964 attack ad against Barry Goldwater, "the most compressed and noxious political ad ever made," which featured a little girl's face disappearing into an atomic mushroom cloud and never mentioned Goldwater at all. Still, it's hard to see how Apple's 1984 commercial, or Michael Jordan's Nike spots, or ads for the VW bug, Absolut vodka or Marlboros did much to change the perceptual universe. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press (December 26, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609807234
• ISBN-13: 978-0609807231
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #382,489 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but seems Outdated, March 6, 2002

By	Jay (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Twenty Ads That Shook the World: The Century's Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All (Hardcover)

It's hard to say what makes a good ad. Is it humor? Memorability (yeah, I know that's not really a word. So sue me!)? Clarity?

The book talks about a lot of different types of ads, including some very old ones such as for Pear's Soap. That was particularly interesting to a layperson such as myself.

However, it didn't cover Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" or anything from Alka-Seltzer, both of which are very memorable - and the Wendy's ad cropped up during a Reagan-Mondale debate in 1984!

I would also have liked to have seen some more recent trends covered, such as the MTV style of advertising, or the ironic/nasty ads (e. g. for rental cars companies that show accidents).

A good read, but could use a makeover.

28 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Absolut Regurgitation, April 29, 2000

By	Zoran Svetlicic (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Twenty Ads That Shook the World: The Century's Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All (Hardcover)

While it includes several amusing anecdotes, such as the origin of Marlboro Man's tattoo, "Twenty Ads That Shook the World" is disappointing. The analysis surrounding the rather obviously chosen ads in the book is largely regurgitated from Twitchell's otherwise superb Adcult USA. Sadly, despite the Wired-esque fluorescent pink and yellow dust jacket, Mr. Twitchell also manages to completely miss the Internet and its effect on advertising.

Readers interested in the collision commercialism and society should opt for Twitchell's earlier "Adcult USA," while students of advertising can find deeper insights about what makes ads tick in Judith Williamson's "Deconstructing Advertisements."

Has Twitchell become, as David Ogilvy would put it, an extinct volcano? I certainly hope not - but this book makes me wonder.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, January 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Twenty Ads That Shook the World: The Century's Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All (Hardcover)

20 ads from the last century which are fascinating to examine. Each may appear simple on the surface, but as Twitchell closely analyses these ads he reveals that they are profound in nature. As a museum of art has great pictures, a museum of advertising would include these 20 profound ads. These are ads which even today stand out as great successful works of advertising even though the product they advertised may no longer exist. These ads not only sell, but they changed the way we sell things. They are groundbreaking. There's the 1962 ad that made a small Volkswagen Beetle look better than a large Oldsmobile or Buick or Dodge. There's the 1942 advertisement that got commuters to stop complaining about the lousy passenger railroad service. There's the very successful and long running ad campaign that gave the attribute of flight to ordinary tennis shoes. There's advertising campaign that made an ordinary toothpaste a best seller, and the advertising campaign that took an ordinary shirt and made it special. There's the advertising campaign that gently shepherded our society so consumers to pay a large sum of money for a gemstone, and the advertising campaign that gently guided our society into accepting a radically new product.

Twitchell analyses them all. I found it fascinating.