There was a time. A time before Netflix. A time before YouTube. A time before internet advertising. A time before political correctness. That time was called the 80s. There was no skipping past adverts. Watch a movie on ITV, and you’d be hard pressed to avoid them. That’s why they became the talk of the town. Catchy jingles were hummed around the office, taglines bubbling around the water cooler.
Today, smart phones reside in the pockets of buyers. Back in the 80s, it was the television. Not in people’s pockets, but in their living rooms. Video had indeed killed the radio star. Cable TV arrived. With it came MTV and an explosion in the number of channels.
As the movie Poltergeist prophesied, the spectre of businesses and advertisers would haunt the homes of prospect buyers forever more. The gateway had opened.
Pre-internet, the attention spans of audiences were already shrinking. This was in large part thanks to MTV which ushered in a new age of fast-cut, narrative driven music videos. And, sure enough, television adverts got caught in the slipstream of this transmutation. TV advertising flourished. This gave rise to some of the most memorable and attention-grabbing commercials ever produced.
So, without further ado, let’s pull back the curtains of your home theatre and present the 10 greatest television adverts of the 80s.
