High Five: Favourites from a Gen X Creative

How many licks does it take? This ad just gave me a mission that involves candy. The real question is how many Tootsie Pops did I eat trying to answer this question?

The brief: what if we throw away our traditional ad budget and take an old idea, a newsprint advertising circular like grocery stores use, fill it with amazing design and editorial content, and have all the 'ads' be for our store and products. Although short-lived, Slant was both a fantastic piece of contemporary design, literature and art, and an ingenious way to sell products to a generation notoriously allergic to traditional marketing. Kind of an OK Cola exercise without the bad aftertaste.

These spots have it all: the lead role, a.k.a. 'the target' is often a man (very rare in the cosmetics category), there’s whistling, and perhaps the best advertising art direction idea of the last century - cutting the soap down its side with a pocketknife in every commercial.

Before retargeting, programmatic, analytics and SEO, social and even before mobile phones, Benetton Group built a literal fashion empire selling oversized, overpriced sweaters by doing one thing really well: telling people what they believed in as a brand in an exigent way.

This is perhaps the ultimate Gen X spot, shot by the legendary Jonathan Glazer. Moody, cinematic, arresting and dripping with adventure, this feels squarely like a thumb in the eye from Glazer to his previous client, Levi’s, which really seems more suited for this level of artistry and daring. For all of its on-the-nose Gen X predictability, I just can’t shake loving this every time I see it.