The 100 Best TV Commercials: . . . and Why They Worked
For better or worse, television advertising occasionally becomes a touchstone in our lives. Chevrolet's "Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie," Alka-Seltzer's spicy meatball, the Federal Express fast talker, the Energizer Bunny, "Bo Knows" Nike, Quaker Oats' Mikey--these and a select group of other video campaigns get so embedded in our psyches that we can easily recall them, word-for-word and scene-by-scene, many years after they last were aired.The 100 Best TV Commercials ... and Why They Worked, by advertising and marketing columnist Bernice Kanner, takes a critical but fond look at the best commercials in 15 categories, including "Show and Tell," "The Sound of Music," "Animal Magnetism," "Comparatively Speaking," and "Killer Comedy." While the book unabashedly "honors esthetics more than effectiveness in moving product," Kanner still seeks to celebrate those "artful and artistic" efforts that manage to push their various objects or ideas more successfully than the competition. One pleasant surprise: more than half of those chosen will be unfamiliar to most Americans, as they aired only in the U.K., France, Japan, Spain, and eight other countries that take their TV commercials as seriously as advertisers do in the U.S.--Howard Rothman