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3 January 2011 Last updated at 11:44 ET

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By Katie Connolly
BBC News, Washington

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Art, advertising and social media collide in a BBC World News America report
on the changing face of the ad industry in the digitial age

Advertisers have always sought to influence and persuade - no

more so than at this time of year. But since the advent of mass
communications, there has been only a handful of ads that
monumentally changed the way people think about a product. A
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Brain boxes
DeBeers Are we all secret geniuses waiting
to happen?
Through its bold advertising, diamond giant
Asia rising
DeBeers did something extraordinary - it
Has Cambodia become a country
managed to convince generations of men and for sale?
women that the only acceptable symbol of an
engagement was a diamond ring. 'We are human'
Poster artist takes on immigration
Prior to the "A Diamond is Forever" campaign - debate WORLD NEWS AMERICA
which launched in 1948 and was named by
Advertising Age as the most effective campaign Still smiling?
of the 20th Century - diamond rings weren't
Before the A Diamond is Forever ads, diamond rings Europeans coping with the
synonymous with marriage or engagement. economic crisis
weren't the premier symbol of engagement
Peruse 19th Century literature and there's nary
a mention of diamond engagement rings.

But DeBeers changed that. M

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Diamonds aren't particularly rare, but they are the hardest substance on Shared Read Watched/Listened
earth - a quality that lends itself to notions of eternity. In pointing that out,
and infusing it with notions of romance, DeBeers literally changed Global Nazi investigations rise
Western culture.
Floods Queensland's 'worst ever'
Volkswagen
Obama attends memorial in Arizona
As fans of TV's Mad Men surely know, American advertisers in the late
1950s and early 1960s fed consumers a steady diet of traditional gender Germany acid tanker capsizes on Rhine: two
stereotypes, earnest claims of product efficacy and aspirational missing
characterisations of the American dream.
What does 'blood libel' mean?
Volkswagen humbly shattered those
conventions.

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conventions. Gates on N Korea: Get 'serious'
The Beetle was a car that Americans did not
want. It was made by Germans, whose relations In pictures: Tunisia unrest
with America were mired in post-war tension. It
had an odd shape and a loud, roaring engine. Mexican activist Chavez murdered

By contrast, the ideal American cars at the time Night-sky image is biggest ever
were enormous, powerful machines, sleekly
lined and finished with flashy fins. While VW's Think Small ad pioneered the use of irony and
wit in advertising Japan PM's wife puts husband down
American automakers were busy seeking
inspiration from the burgeoning airline industry,
the VW Beetle seemed stodgy and grounded.
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Then, in 1959, VW unveiled its "Think Small" campaign, deliberately
highlighting the vehicle's perceived flaw.

There was no pretty girl casting her flirty eye over the car. There was no
cool guy driving it. It was nothing short of groundbreaking.

"It was self-deprecating. It was the first post-modern ad," Bob Garfield, an
advertising industry consultant and former columnist for Advertising Age,
told the BBC.

"Hitherto all advertising had been as serious as a thrombosis. That ad

ushered in a whole era of humour, wit and irony in advertising." Volkswagen revs up to conquer America
The sprawling VW stand at the Detroit auto show
VW followed up with the famous "Lemon" ad, which informed car-buyers shows the company's vast ambitions
of VW's process of weeding out bad vehicles, while cheekily nodding at
worries that the Beetle itself was a lemon.

Many advertisers followed suit. Perhaps most notably Avis rental cars, P
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whose We Try Harder campaign made a virtue out of their second place
position in the US market.

The Marlboro Man

The Marlboro Man certainly wasn't the first iconic advertising figure.

In 1939, Coca-Cola helped create the modern

image of a cheery, rotund, red-outfitted Santa
Claus. Before that, representations of St Nick
had ranged from skinny and creepy, to stern
and downright scary. World News America
How gun supporters are keeping US gun culture alive
Ronald McDonald, like the Marlboro Man, is so
recognisable that the product name need not
be displayed. ADS BY GOOGLE

The Marlboro Man transformed the brand into an JMP Statistical Software
But the Marlboro Man did something more. He JMP Statistical Discovery software
ultra-masculine accessory
transformed the Marlboro brand from a mild from SAS. Get a Free 30 day trial.
ladies' cigarette into a rugged, ultra-masculine www.jmp.com
accessory.

Unlike Ronald McDonald, men aspired to be the Marlboro Man.

The campaign was wildly successful - Marlboro sales increased 300% in

the two years after the ad debuted in 1955.

"There is just a handful of ads ever created that have actually become
more important than the product itself, that created wealth and built
fortunes," Mr Garfield said.

The Marlboro Man did that through the simple insight that a person's
cigarette could speak to his or her self image.

James Twitchell, author of 20 Ads that Shook the World, told the BBC that
in addition, the Marlboro Man was an achievement because it found
success at a time when Americans were learning that cigarettes were
genuinely dangerous, addictive products that could kill you.

"The Marlboro Man was strong, powerful. He never speaks. He's so

tough," Mr Twitchell said. "The genius of the ad is that at the same time
there was a rising realisation that this thing will kill you, it was identified
with a character who was, on the face of it, indomitable."

Sadly, the three actors who played the Marlboro Man died of lung cancer.
One sued Phillip Morris and the cigarettes became known colloquially as
"cowboy killers".

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 Nike

In many ways, the differences between pairs of training shoe are

marginal. Mr Twitchell calls them fungible, "essentially interchangeable."

But successive savvy advertising strategies

turned a little Oregon sports outfitter into the
globally dominant sports giant Nike. Their
swoosh logo is now one of the most
recognizable images on the planet, rendering
the actual name unnecessary.

And while Nike may not have been the first

company to seek celebrity plugs, its relationship
with Michael Jordan is arguably the most
successful endorsement in history. The globally recognized swoosh is one of Nike's
advertising successes
"Nike's great insight was forget the shoe, own
the athlete," says Mr Twitchell.

The release of the Just Do It motto in 1988 was a transformative moment

for the company, weaving their brand, seemingly forever, with the
inspiring and dramatic physicality of sport.

"This was advertising transcending the product. Nike is not a design or a

style. It's an idea. They own sport - its passion, its grit," said Mr Garfield.

"They use the same offshore factories and cheap materials as everybody
else. But they represent the drama and passion of sport. They just own
it."

Absolut Vodka

Like DeBeers, Absolut Vodka's advertising literally created a

market where one did not exist.

In 1981, Absolut launched a campaign that would run for

nearly three decades using simple ads with prominent
images of their distinctive vodka bottle and plays on the
word "absolute".

Before that, vodka had seldom been advertised and there

was no premium vodka industry.

"Absolut turned a commodity into a badge brand," Mr

Garfield said. "They did it on brand name and bottle shape.
It was a remarkable visual campaign."

Mr Twitchell agrees.

"Vodka is a hard drink to separate on the basis of taste, so Absolut Vodka created a new market
they separated their brand through narrative and package," (Image courtesy Absolut Vodka)
he says.

These days, premium vodka is an enormous business. Brands like Grey

Goose, Ketel One and Chopin owe much to Absolut's pioneering ads.

President Lyndon Johnson

American political advertising is a multi-billion

dollar industry these days. Many campaigns
have been highly effective, including Ronald
Reagan's It's Morning in America campaign
or the Republican "Willie Horton" attack ad
against Michael Dukakis.

But few campaigns have been as memorable

or as devastating as the Daisy ad.

It depicted a young girl playing innocently with
a flower in a field. She looks up towards the
sky and the camera zooms in on her eye and
cuts to a shot of an atomic mushroom cloud.
An announcer urges Americans to vote for
Lyndon Johnson because "the stakes are too
high for you to stay home".
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version of the flash player. Download the
correct version
Although aired just once, this chilling ad is considered
one of the most effective US political history

The ad was chilling and probably unfair, and it paved the way for the

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 The ad was chilling and probably unfair, and it paved the way for the
modern attack ad.

"It really showed that dirty advertising could produce clear results for the
person who could do it well," said Mr Twitchell.

It was also pioneering in a different sense.

The ad was only played once as a paid advertisement by the Democratic

National Committee. But it was so controversial it was shown numerous
times on news programs and referred to in newspapers and magazines.

The ad was so good it got free publicity - a scenario many campaigns

have tried to emulate, but few have actually managed.

Honourable mentions

Apple's 1984 ad, directed by film legend Ridley

Scott, was screened just once, but it imprinted
Apple as what Mr Garfield calls "the heroic
insurgent against the looming, evil, tyrannical
information Big Brother, which at that point was
IBM".

With Macintosh, Apple had created a

revolutionary operating system, relying on a
mouse and desktop icons. But the ad didn't
show a glimpse of either. It simply branded Calvin Klein continues to make racy ads
Apple as smashing convention.

In 1980, 15-year-old Brooke Shields sparked controversy when she told

audiences in a breathy whisper: "You know what comes between me and
my Calvins? Nothing."

The overt sexualization of a young girl in the service of Calvin Klein jeans
outraged many Americans, but it also sparked a designer denim craze
that persists to this day, and encouraged Calvin Klein to continue to
produce racy, provocative ads for decades.

"It was the beginning of the shockervertising plague that befell the
Western world for five years," Mr Garfield said ruefully. "Calvin Klein
wasn't an advertiser as much as an arsonist."

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US 'must heal' amid Arizona grief
President Barack Obama honours the victims of
the Arizona shooting and urges a "sharply
polarised" US to heal its divisions.

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