Mine were back in the 1950’s, some have been mentioned already (“Hey Mabel, Black Label” and “You’ll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush you teeth with Pepsodent”)
There was also the hair product Brylcreem, where “A little dab will do ya”
And the twins for Doublemint Gum “Double your pleasure, double your fun”
And one a bit newer that’s stuck with me for all these years, the 1970’s Uniroyal ‘Tiger Paws’ commercial. Uniroyal tires Commercial - YouTube
I remember the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports (aka the Friday Night Fights) but I only vaguely remember some of the Gillette commercials.
One TV commercial from local TV I do remember from the 50’s, my sister and I used to sing the jingle all the time, was for a local company called Grandma’s Cookies (not affiliated with the national brand of the same name). Perhaps we paid special attention because my mother worked for that company.
Finally, I remember an animated commercial for Kraft Cottage Cheese. It featured, I believe, a duck, next to a countdown clock, who started out saying “I have six seconds to sing!” The song was: “Buy Kraft Cottage Cheese, You’ll love it love it, buy Kraft (screech while pushing back the second hand) Cottage Cheese!” What it lacked in charm it made up for in brevity.
Mine would be this rather insane Red Rose Tea commercial from the late '50s that seemed to show up a lot during Saturday morning cartoons. Had no idea that kids were such tea drinkers.
Somebody mentioned Henson’s muppets being in commercials in the sixties. In East Tennessee they advertised Kerns Bread. One would say, “everybody likes Kerns Bre-ad!” The other, who looked sort of like a proto-Bert, would say, “not everybody.” Either he would be stomped by a foot or snatched away by a hand, followed by “now everybody likes Kerns Bre-ad.” Here are some examples:
Good one. I meant to mention that commercial as well, but it escaped my mind before I finished my last post. Apparently it also dates from 1971. I was just three years old at the time, but it ran for some time after it was released (along with the Coke commercial).
(Despite the criticism in the linked article, I wish that there would be more of renewed push for anti-littering campaigns. In recent years I’ve noticed fewer anti-litter campaigns, and more and more litter.)
I’d have to go with Josephine the Plumber for Comet cleaning powder, mid 60s. How shocked I was when they replaced it with NEW Comet! Josephine was a definite precursor for Flo from Progressive Insurance.
Also, Mrs. Olson for Folger’s Coffee. WWII was still recent enough to make people wonder if she was maybe a war criminal on the lam…
This is probably the oldest I remember.
Although, I do remember an ad for, what, Yoo Hoo soda, with an animated Yogi Berra climbing to the top of the outfield wall - or maybe the Yoo Hoo billboard. At five or six years old, and not a baseball fan, I remember being confused about Yogi not being an animated bear.
I was having a hard time coming up with an answer to this question, and then I realized why. When my sister and I were little kids, we thought that TV consisted entirely of PBS, because (thanks to subtle but effective guidance from Mom) we never watched anything else. The only exposure I had to other channels as a kid was that the babysitter’s husband watched Indians games on channel 43 (at the time, an unaffiliated station). And the only commercial I remember from that (probably from frequent repetition) is the station’s own plug, a little jingle that said “Channel 43 plays favorites”.
So I guess that station-ID jingle is the oldest commercial I remember.
I remember lots of old commercials but I have no idea which is the earliest. I remember several that have been mentioned above, including “ancient Chinese secret”, “Hey Mikey”, “My balogna has a first name”, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” and the crying Indian PSA.
One I didn’t see mentioned is the animated Scrubbing Bubbles ad. I couldn’t have been more than five years old which would put it at 1974-75 at the latest, but probably earlier. I thought the scrubbing bubbles were cute and was always sad when they went down the drain.
Another is the series of PSAs featuring Woodsy Owl (“Give a hoot, don’t pollute.”). Apparently they started airing in 1971.
Also there was a series of Ty D Bol commercial featuring a miniature man in a miniature boat floating in a toilet tank. That kind of imagery tends to stick with you, even if you don’t want it to. Here’s one version from 1971 but I’m not sure that’s the one I remember.
Another early one I remember is the Dow Bathroom Cleaner ad with the animated “scrubbing bubbles”. A bunch of anthropomorphized animated bubbles would come out of the bottle and clean the bathroom in the ad leaving it sparkling. I wanted my mom to buy that brand of cleaner, because I thought the bubbles would literally come out of the bottle and clean the bathroom just like in the ad.
As a kid, my mom would call me “messy Marvin” for being klutzy; I recall it coming from an ad. Google tells me it’s a reference to a pitch for Hershey’s chocolate syrup from around 1980, when I was a toddler.
Even though I didn’t grow up in Omaha, my local TV stations did this periodically, and the tone hurt my ears and frightened me. I would usually hide behind the living room drapes when it came on (yes, I was that young).
