It’s Commercial <i> Deja Vu </i> as Old Ad Slogans Become the ‘Latest’ Thing

When Timex hired a new ad firm last year, officials at the agency told Timex executives exactly what they didn’t want to hear.

Why not bring back the slogan made famous by John Cameron Swayze: “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” For that matter, the agency suggested, why not bring back Swayze himself to say it?

At first, Timex didn’t like either idea. For one, Swayze, who is 83, was too ill at the time to appear in the new ads. And besides, with hot competitors such as Swatch, Timex desperately wanted to modernize its image--not reach back into the vault for a decades-old ad slogan.

But research convinced Timex otherwise. It revived the slogan and is just one of many advertisers returning to their pasts. An epidemic of nostalgia for the ads that baby boomers were brought up with seems to be sweeping Madison Avenue these days. “Two mints in one” recently made a commercial return for Certs. The “Nestea Plunge” is back again. The familiar “Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t” slogan for Almond Joy and Mounds candy bars is back on TV. And, yes, you are again hearing Campbell’s soup’s “Mmmmm, Good,” and Maxwell House Coffee’s “Good to the last drop.”

In the case of Timex, the company asked 2,000 consumers what they remembered most about the watch maker. “Just about everyone said, ‘It takes a licking and keeps on ticking,’ ” said Ron Sok, manager of advertising at Timex. “Keep in mind, we hadn’t used that slogan in our ads for 10 years.”

So, Timex went back to the future, dusted off its old slogan and added a few funny modern twists. One ad, which has been running for months, features Timex watches that are strapped to the bellies of two Sumo wrestlers. And a new commercial scheduled to be broadcast next month shows a psychic with special powers who is able to bend a key and a fork, but naturally can’t get the Timex to tick its last tock.

Another new Timex ad that will run next month features an opera singer whose shrill voice breaks every object in the opera hall--except the Timex. And for nostalgia’s sake, the new Timex ads even feature the old recordings of stalwart spokesman Swayze verifying that the watch is, indeed, still ticking. “It’s the best way to leverage the fact that you’ve been in business for a while,” said Houman Pirdavari, art director at Timex’s Minneapolis ad firm, Fallon McElligott.

Advertisers who are reusing these slogans insist that the trend is not because of some sort of creativity dearth. Instead, they say, the best slogans often are the tried and true--especially when people remember these old campaigns as if they’d just heard them.

“Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you say in ads, just as long as you have the money to say it over and over again,” said Michael Ray, professor of marketing at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. “Even if you don’t remember an old ad slogan exactly,” said Ray, “when you hear it again, it can jog your mind in a very powerful way.”

But some ad executives say the reason for this trend is all too clear. “There are few really good ideas that people respond to,” said Cliff Freeman, president of the New York ad agency Cliff Freeman & Partners. “For lack of any new ideas, people fall back on the old ones.”

He ought to know. Back in 1973, Freeman wrote the catchy ad slogan for the Almond Joy and Mounds candy bar commercials. Now, after years of not using the slogan, Hershey revived it this month in its TV commercials.

But the company says the return to its former slogan was mandated by research--not by a lack of new ideas. “We hadn’t run that campaign since 1981,” said Bill Stamey, brand manager at Hershey Chocolate USA in Hershey, Pa. “But in our research, people kept playing it back to us as if we’d never stopped using it.”

That’s precisely why the maker of Certs also this month began to broadcast the familiar breath mints ad slogan.

“We were trying to develop new ads for the campaign,” said Jo Ann Meyer, senior vice president and creative director at the New York ad agency Young & Rubicam. “But every consumer we asked kept repeating that line that’s been gone for seven years.”

Using another ad agency’s slogan is not something many ad firms like to do. “We were pretty skeptical,” said Meyer. “It’s always nice to come up with a brand-new campaign. But the consumers kept telling us something else.” So the line, “Two mints in one,” has returned, but this time it is set to music. The agency also added the line, “Two is better than one.”

And after several years of trying to convince American consumers that “Soup is good food,” Campbell’s has dumped the slogan and once again returned to the old faithful, “Mmmmm, Good.”

The company denies that the change is in any way related to investigations by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general from nine states, who have questioned the health claims made for some Campbell products. “The old standby tested very well with consumers,” said Pam Marcus, senior vice president at Campbell’s New York ad agency, Backer Spielvogel Bates. “Besides, the time is right. Nostalgia is in.”

Even the Nestea plunge--where people take a swig of Nestea and suddenly get drenched--recently returned to TV after an eight-year absence.

“We didn’t go back to it out of desperation or because we couldn’t do something better,” said Richard Di Lallo, senior vice president and creative director at the New York ad agency J. Walter Thompson. “The research was overwhelming. It no longer makes sense not to use it.”

L.A. Gear Looks at Best Way to Use Jackson

Is Michael Jackson worth $20 million to L.A. Gear?

Maybe. But only if Jackson sings in the commercials--and only if the ads are very narrowly targeted toward kids ages 6 to 11. At least, that is the opinion of Steven Levitt, president of Marketing Evaluations, a Port Washington, N.Y.-based research firm that is very highly regarded for its detailed research on celebrities.

“If the ads contain his music and are directed at kids, he could be great for them,” said Levitt. “But if he tries to be a spokesperson or does anything other than sing and dance, it could be a dismal failure.”

Levitt said there are plenty of other celebrities who rate much higher with kids than Jackson--including Michael Jordan, who is a spokesman for rival Nike. And he said Jackson is not particularly popular with teen-agers or adults. Still, Jackson’s popularity with children has remained “extremely high” since the company began researching the pop star in 1985, he said.

L.A. Gear executives have stated that their new line of athletic shoes, “Unstoppable,” which Jackson will help design and market, will indeed be aimed at kids. L.A. Gear Chairman Robert Y. Greenberg said Jackson is likely to star in a L.A. Gear video promoting youth fitness. “He will talk to children of all ages around the world,” said Sandy Saemann, executive vice president at L.A. Gear.

In the meantime, company executives say that despite the addition of Jackson, former Los Angeles Laker Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will continue to be a spokesman for L.A. Gear. A new commercial that features Abdul-Jabbar was recently filmed but probably will not be broadcast until spring.

Saemann said L.A. Gear plans to build an office for Jackson at its headquarters. And as for Jackson’s corporate title, jested Saemann: “It will be Sir Michael.”