Best Ads Of The Last 50 Years: #1

The Yank "Mad Men" (and Women, to be accurate) may have owned the 60s, but the Brits produced many of the best ads of the 70s and 80s.

Two Heineken ads with, I think, the best beer tagline in beer ad history (except for maybe Schaefer’s).

The above cracking 1985 commercial is a riff on the movie My Fair Lady where a lower-class Eliza Doolittle (played by Audrey Hepburn) keeps trying and failing to pronounce “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” like a “fair” British lady would. In the Heineken spot, this premise is flipped as an uppercrust student attending the School of Street Credibility (LOL) can’t tap her inner Cockney while saying “The water in Majorca don’t taste like what it ought to”. Enter “Dale” with some Heineys for her “laughing gear”. Bam—she’s a Street bird.

The beer brand’s long-running tagline was altered slightly to fit the commercial.

Go back 10 years to 1975 for the above wonderful billboard that perfectly visualized the tagline. Compare it to the terrible celeb ads from last Sunday’s Super Bowl. Here’s the fun backstory on how the billboard got made. The same London ad agency produced both ads: Collett Dickenson Pearce & Partners.