9 spots left to attend the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit
For our inaugural Digiday Throwback Thursday supercut, we’re taking you back to the 1980s, a simpler time, before DVRs or Roku, when you had to actually sit through commercials on television. To inform our millennial readers (and take Gen Xers on a New Coke nostalgia trip), we tracked down some of the best ’80s ads.
Included here are culinary gems like the Grey Poupon campaign — but of course — and less high-falutin’ fare like Hungry-Man’s microwaveable dinners. A few furry mascots make cameos like Bud Light’s party animal Spuds MacKenzie and the Energizer Bunny. There are even human spokesmen, too, including a America’s Dad, a pre-scandal Bill Cosby shilling Jell-O. Michael J. Fox braves the rain for a Diet Pepsi.
The more iconic commercials from the ’80s transcended television, becoming cultural touchstones in their own right, like Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” ad. Apple’s Ridley Scott-directed Macintosh spot tapped George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 for inspiration.
If your memory is hazy, just sit back and take a nostalgic trip back to the ’80s.
More in Media
The Rundown: The potential browser buyers if Google’s forced to sell Chrome
Antitrust trial witnesses from OpenAI, Perplexity, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo testified about buying Chrome if a judge forces a sale.
As AI lawsuits mount, publishers still struggle to block the bots
Ziff Davis is the latest media company to sue OpenAI over copyright infringement, but the lawsuit highlights a broader reality: Publishers still have no reliable way to stop AI companies from scraping their content.
TikTok touts livestreaming as next big revenue stream for creators and agencies
Through private Discord servers and Zoom webinars, TikTok’s livestreaming push is educating creators about live gifting on TikTok Live.