The Hamster Dance is a very powerful meme. 
I remember he did local ones in St. Louis for Laclede Gas. “Heat pump, shmeat pump.”
The Pets.com sock puppet came back as a mascot for Bar None loans.
I just read an article about this: 9 out of 10 images on Google with safe search,off were porn. They decided to stop using the character in their spots.
Never mind.
Clara Peller, whose career took off late in life after becoming the “Where’s the Beef?” lady.
The Crash Test Dummies. They were originally created for use in public service announcements to promote car safety. They became very popular and people wanted to buy merchandise with the characters. But because they had originally been created for a government agency they couldn’t be used for commercial purposes. The government finally agreed to end the PSA campaign so the ad agency that created the characters could cash in on them. The Crash Test Dummies became a line of toys and a cartoon series.
I saw an ad with him selling cars just this evening.
See also Cecil Adams on Paul Bunyan. Advertising helped popularize Paul Bunyan but he wasn’t invented for advertising.
God bless capitalism…
I think more germane to the OP is that this phrase became popular in many other contexts, particularly in describing a politician as a “lightweight” without any real experience or redeeming qualities. I.e. – where’s the beef?
The Evereready Energizer Bunny was originaly a “cool” response (he wore shades, after all) to the Duracell commercial that showed battery-powered toy rabbits beating on snare drums running down as their power drained, but the one with a Duracell batttery clearly visible (the toys were constructed so the batteries stuck out). So Eveready responded with a shades-wearing marching rabbit beating a bass drum that “kept going and going…”, demolishing the competition.
After that the Eveready rabbit took on a life of its own, being used in commercials that didn’t refer to competitors or toys.
Another example is the “Joe Isuzu” character. I still think the original commercial is hilarious. By saying that Joe is a compulsive liar (something most people believed about car salesmen anyway) they got away with him making absurd claims on the air (for which small-print disclaimers ran on the bottom of the screen).
Joe: “The Isuzu – so cheap you can buy it with your pocket change.”
(Disclaimer at bottom of screen : “Provided you have $9,800 in quarters and nickels”)
Joe: “And it will run forever on a tankful of gas”
(Disclaimer: Your Mileage May Vary")
They did variations on Joe as a liar, but nothing ever matched the effect of that first commerccial, and then they strayed from this into Joe’s private life (and, much later, his comeback.)
This strikes me as odd… Your character was so successful that people are literally masturbating to your advertisement. Isn’t that like the Holy Grail of advertising?
Well, not if people are linking your mascot with creepy masturbators instead of low insurance rates. Although I have to wonder how many people are doing Google Image searched for Erin Esurance for “benign” reasons.
Her red light career aside, the commercials themselves seemed to lose steam fairly early on, going from a secret agent who needed quick insurance as part of her spy activities to Erin hanging out at bars or baseball games, lecturing her friends about the ease of buying insurance.
I believe the Erin Esurance thing was a case of executives “Hey, the company has changed a lot, we I think it’s time to move on from this mascot.” “You’re probably right…you know she’s really popular with cartoon porn dudes right?” “Oh. Yes, we’ll drop that campaign.”
The porn thing was just the thing that sealed the deal with the company moving on, not the cause.
Slight off-topic, but a very early cousin of Kermit the Frog used to torture, abuse, drown, stab, brand and straight out murder motherfuckers who wouldn’t drink his preferred brand of coffee.
Not if people start associating your product with sweaty basement dwellers and not insurance.
How about the Budweiser frogs, which became commercials about a chameleon who hired a ferret to kill the frogs.
Maxwell. The pig is names, Maxwell.