One Of The Best "Disruptive" Campaigns In Ad History.

You marketing "gurus" foisted this horseshit buzzword into the advertising "conversation". Now learn WTF you're actually talking about.

Here’s one “take”:

“Disruption is all about risk-taking, trusting your intuition, and rejecting the way things are supposed to be. Disruption goes way beyond advertising, it forces you to think about where you want your brand to go and how to get there”.—Richard Branson

41 words that mean absolutely nothing. From a billionaire.

An MBA probably wrote this. How insightful.

Marketers know how to tell you what stuff is, using their mouths and markers and decks to blahblahblah. Ad creatives will fucking create it and fucking show you.

Like below.

Before it was called 7-UP, the soda was called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda—invented in 1920. It had seven natural ingredients (including Lithium until 1950), which is where the new name came from.

Art by Peter Max.

“The Uncola" campaign—which replaced the uncool "You Like It, It Likes You”—was launched in 1967 by J.Walter Thompson, NYC (written by Charlie Martell) and disrupted the fucking Hell out of the soda market. It was the perfect time, socially, to go counter the norm.

JWT held a nationwide contest for artists to submit images for the billboard campaign. Peter Max, Pat Dypold, Ed Georges, and Milton Glaser, among others, entered works that sold.

Two by Glaser.

Two by Pat Dypold.

“CANVENIENCE FOR ALL”. For patriotic antiestablishmentarians, too. By Jacqui Morgan.

Two by Ed George. The writing was as fun as the art.

Brilliant. By Nancy Martell.

By John Alcorn.

Until the mid-1970s, the billboards/ads just kept coming.

One last gorgeous one by Dypold.

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Yes, the campaign worked. Young cool people hung poster versions of the billboards/ads in their dorm/bedrooms. 7-UP sales skyrocketed from near bankruptcy to taking major chunks of market share from Coke and Pepsi. 7-UP abandoned the tagline in 1998, and they’ve been flapping in the water ever since.