Picture this. A kid teases a baby elephant with his last Rolo.
“Scary stuff kids,” as Count Floyd would say on SCTV’s Monster Chiller Horror Theatre.
Even if you hate AI as much as I hate dressing up for Halloween, using data centers to make give you a cheap vampire cape, fangs a side kick and can now imagine this entire newsletter being read in a clumsy Bela Lugosi impression it’s worth it
Okay but do you remember those Rolos? You know these chocolates. Been around since 1937. It’s like the 11th most popular chocolate in the UK.
The brand established an absolute banger of a line that ran from 1980 to 2003: “Do you love anyone enough to give them your last Rolo?”
It’s a shame it stopped.
Anyway back to the baby elephant. You guessed it, the elephant never forgets.
It went global and eventually won the Film Grand Prix at Cannes.
The story was beloved. That kid teasing a baby elephant with his last Rolo? Guess what, decades later the elephant finally gets his revenge.
Funny thing about ads. The agency claims it did little for the UK’s 11th most popular chocolate’s sales.
In this issue, perfectly timed to come out the day before Halloween, I want to share some of the greatest candy advertising of all time along with some of the best taglines.
Candy taglines are their own weird little craft. You get maybe five words. Less than ten if you’re really lucky. They have to work on a seven-year-old and on the dad who is holding the pillowcase full of spooky candy haul.
Do it right and people are still saying your tagline in newsletters fifty years later.
So for Halloween I’m ranking them. Fourteen epic lines sorted the only way that matters this week and how you’d feel finding them at the bottom of your bag high on sugar.
BUT FIRST: SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION
If you missed my SoDA Series Live yesterday, don’t worry I got you. It’s here in all its glory.
I sat down with Melissa Gutierrez for a fun talk about advertising nostalgia.
Mostly I talked about stuff I’ve bought on eBay.
Like an unopened box of 1995 Coors collector’s cards. Somebody pitched that in a boardroom. Thirty years later some ad guy bought two boxes for eighteen bucks each. I’m not sure who the market is for them, but it might just be me.
We also got into floppy painter’s hats, purple ketchup, McDonald’s pizza, steak pants, spooky black ranch dressing and the time Campbell’s got caught putting marbles in the soup. Ee even chatted about the joys of procrastination and boredom being the best things for creativity.
WAIT, MORE SELF PROMO: NEW LOOK, SAME DRINK CART.
You also might have noticed the newsletter looks different.
Earlier this year I sent Andrew Klotz a brief. It was mostly photos of dive bar coasters, a matchbook from a lounge called the Fantasy Room, a few hand-painted bar signs and a pile of golden-age print ads.
The ask was something that felt like it was designed on a cocktail napkin by someone who happens to be really good at design.
He nailed it. His test for every decision was simple: “Would this look right printed on a coaster and left on the bar?”
What I didn’t expect was how much it would change the newsletter itself. Seeing the brand come together made it obvious what The Drink Cart has been circling all along. This is the home of ad nostalgia. The ads you remember. The stories you don’t. You’ll see that focus sharpen in every issue from here on.
This is what people can do that AI can’t. Andrew read a messy brief full of coasters and old ads, understood the feeling behind it and made it better than I could have described.
Andrew said the best compliment would be someone assuming it always looked like this. I think that’s already happening.
Thank you, Andrew. If your brand needs this kind of thinking, go see him: andrewklotz.ca.
FINALLY THE RANKINGS: 14 TAGLINES. ONE MUCH NEEDED TOOTHBRUSH.
If you were back trick or treating in North Vancouver in about 1985, between Fairway Drive and Dollarton Highway you might also want a full sized Super Socco drink box before cruising down Caddy Road. But, that is probably meaningless to most of you. What you want is candy taglines and rankings.
S-TIER: FULL-SIZE BARS
These are what you expect from the house every kid at school is talking about on November 1st.
When M&M’s dropped the “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands” they knew they were cooking. Rosser Reeves wrote a banger of a product benefit, a product demo and a dare all in eight memorable words. Candy has been chasing a line this good ever since.
The line was out for more than a decade before they dropped the 1954 “Which Hand?” spot. Everyone assumes Mad Men drew on Bates and Reeves when building its characters, so in case you are wondering, this is basically the Don Draper of candy ads. Smoke accordingly.
Then you have Almond Joy/Mounds. The only full size bar with that is essentially two sister bars. The line "Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't" worked beautifully as the brand turned two bars into one incredible jingle.
If they had PowerPoint back then, some made a helluva 40-slide deck to arrive at this incredible line. All for a candy that was decidedly not cool.
Then we have Kit Kat’s "Have a break, have a Kit Kat." Donald Gilles at JWT London wrote it in May 1957 for the British factory tea break. Here’s an incredible product that you can literally “break” apart and the line tells you when to eat it. That’s how you sell a chocolate bar. Market sugar to the workers at the factory.
Then there’s this wonderful 1987 pandas spot. A photographer waits all day at the zoo and the pandas only come out on roller skates once he steps away for his break. To be fair, the dude got the chocolate and the pandas got nothing.
One of those old timey candy’s that you still remember is Tootsie Pops. This was a Halloween mainstay in my neighbourhood. Then they dropped the iconic: “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?”
A tagline that forces you to see how many. It ends on “the world may never know.” When a tagline has no answer you can run it since 1969. Even universities have tried to solve this marketing riddle.
In the original 60-second spot Mr. Owl was voiced by Paul Winchell, the same guy who voiced Tigger, Gargamel and Dick Dastardly. Talk about range. And tell me you’re old without telling me you’re old.
A TIER: FUN SIZED
Still a good haul. Nobody's complaining about these bars.
Caramilk captured about 25% of my childhood headspace pondering the mind bending question: “How do they get the caramel in the Caramilk bar?” Genius. Cadbury took a very boring manufacturing detail and turned it into a national conspiracy theory. For me this was peak Canadian advertising, before I even realized I liked advertising.
The wonderful line and secret came from Gary Prouk, who was 26 and already creative director at DDB’s Toronto office when Caramilk launched in 1968. Pick your favorite version of the ad: the businessmen bidding against each other for the secret from the Devil (clearly the one that instantly took me back), the bragging aliens or the WarGames-style kid hacker.
As noted above, Rolo’s "Do you love anyone enough to give them your last Rolo?" Asks a Sophie's Choice of candy decision making. A tagline for a roll of caramels that is darker and smarter than it had any right to be.
You already know about the “Elephant” spot. The ad global is still the best revenge story ever told in thirty seconds for a candy.
The only modern line on here that belongs with the classics. Snickers created "You're not you when you're hungry" then shot Betty White getting tackled in a muddy football game.
BBDO's creative team of Peter Kain and Gianfranco Arena transformed an 88 year old Betty White and took Snickers from the No. 7 global chocolate brand to No. 1. Now that’s a line.
As I was starting in advertising, Skittles launched the weird and wonderful universe of “Taste the rainbow.” Four stupid words that let the brand go completely insane for over 30 years.
Scott Vitrone and Ian Reichenthal at TBWA\Chiat\Day New York are responsible for the classic ad “Touch.” The story of a man turns everything he touches into Skittles and talks about a stranger he shook hands with on the bus who will never see his family again.
C-TIER: BOTTOM OF THE BAG
I mean you’ll still eat it. But you’ll try to trade it first.
Smarties “When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last?” Gave every kid in Canada a ritual they didn’t know they needed.
The 1967 original came out of Ogilvy & Mather Toronto under creative director Gary Gray. That’s two Toronto creative directors in the top ten. Not that anyone’s counting.
Mentos “The Freshmaker.” Dubbed Euro spots so weird they looped back around to cool. Nobody knew what a Freshmaker was. Everyone said it anyway.
It worked. Sales doubled from $20 million in 1991 to $40 million in 1994. The Foo Fighters parodied the whole campaign in their 1996 “Big Me” video.
Mars “A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play.” A health claim no regulator would let through today. Gloriously confident.
Bar trivia: people love to credit F1 commentator Murray Walker with the line. That’s a myth. The agency he worked at wrote it. Mars UK eventually traded it in for “Pleasure you can’t measure,” which is worse.
Coffee Crisp “A nice light snack.” The most Canadian sentence ever written. Apologizes for itself while selling you chocolate.
D-TIER: LIFE IS LIKE A BOX OF GROSS RAISINS OR GUM
Technically a treat. Spiritually a punishment.
Doublemint “Double your pleasure, double your fun.” Technically gum. The twins did most of the heavy lifting.
Twins from Hammond, Indiana, starred in 12 spots from 1959 to 1963, playing tennis, riding bikes and tobogganing. Weirdest afterlife on the list: Wrigley had Chris Brown quietly record a version of the jingle in 2008 called “Forever” and it went to No. 2 on the Billboard charts.
Reese’s “Two great tastes that taste great together” showing people walking around with jars of peanut butter is still the most nonsensical thing in advertising.
“You got chocolate in my peanut butter.” Two people walk into each other, argue about it, take a bite and get over it. They ran it for decades.
COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE TOASTED ALMOND
Sometimes you feel like a nut. For this week’s Friday cocktail you’re getting a drink named after one that doesn’t actually contain any.
The Toasted Almond is amaretto, coffee liqueur and cream. It isn’t even toasted. And it doesn’t have almonds in it either, because the most famous amaretto on earth doesn’t. Disaronno gets its almond flavor from apricot kernel oil. Shocking, I know.
Which makes it the perfect drink for a tagline issue. The name is the whole pitch and the pitch is technically a lie. The Mars people would be proud.
Amaretto has its own great piece of brand mythology, too. Disaronno has long told a story about a young widowed innkeeper in Saronno who, in 1525, steeped apricot kernels in brandy as a thank-you gift for a student of Leonardo da Vinci who had painted her as the Madonna. Lovely story. There’s no way to fact-check it. It’s exactly what you’d want on the label when you start shipping bottles to America, which Disaronno did in the 1960s.
Nobody knows who poured the first Toasted Almond. It’s basically a White Russian that swapped the vodka for amaretto, and it caught on in the 1980s, when every drink was trying to taste like dessert.
TOASTED ALMOND
1 oz amaretto
1 oz coffee liqueur (Kahlúa)
1½ oz heavy cream
Shake hard with ice for about 10 seconds. Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice. Grate a little nutmeg on top if you really want to cosplay a mixologist. Half-and-half works if that’s what’s in the fridge. Add 1 oz vodka and it becomes a Roasted Toasted Almond, which might be the dumbest drink name ever written. Not mad at it.
Happy Halloween. If you’re the house giving out toothbrushes or raisins tomorrow, everyone knows you’re the worst. The whole street knows. For the love of god, hand out the full bars or 2 liters of pop. Or soda. Whatever you call it.