When I was but a boy – a long time ago, there was a short-lived playground trend that involved giving someone a slap in the face and uttering “you’ve been Tango’d”.
Critics at the time labelled it as bullying, but in my experience, it was character building. A quick survey on LinkedIn of my primary school peers shows a neat correlation between frequency of being Tango’d as a child and earning potential as an adult.
Given this you’d be forgiven for thinking being Tango’d was some government-backed initiative to push kids towards engineering and accountancy roles - but you’d be wrong. Believe it or not, this was actually an ad campaign aimed at selling carbonated sugary drinks - likely to children.
How did this happen you ask? One unlikely explanation is that copywriter Alan Young was some form of Übermensch on an altruistic side-quest and managed to hide the real purpose of the ad from his bosses at HHCL and Britvic for the betterment of children nationally.
That would be just wonderful.
Occam’s razor
The most likely explanation however is that this was the 90s, and in the 90s stuff like this just sort of happened.
Back then you see, unless you had a sparkling satellite dish hanging from your guttering, there were only 4 telly channels available for watching, named 1,2, ITV and 4 for some reason.
Having so few channels to watch meant that each evening everyone broadly ended up watching the same stuff – and on the ITV and 4 channels, that meant that we also ended up watching the same ads.
We’re an incredibly social species us humans, and in some respects we’re also incredibly simple. We’ll talk about just about anything - warranted that occasionally includes pondering the deeper meanings of the universe and life itself; however, as I listen to the various chats bouncing around the office as I type this there’s a distinctly more banal theme.
Air conditioning, weather, Ted Lasso, a ‘little’ bit of work. Not exactly highbrow stuff - I’m sure your offices are full of the same sorts of chatter.
Shared experience
We talk mostly about things that we’ve collectively seen, felt, heard, tasted. If we all watched a great TV show last night, we’ll talk about it. If there’s a bad smell in the stairwell, we’ll talk about that too.
This used to also extend to adverts we’d seen. We asked the team to pick a couple of campaigns from each decade that we distinctly remember talking about in real life.
For the 90s we had plenty of suggestions – a couple of favourites were Reebok’s ‘Belly’s Gonna Get Ya’ and our aforementioned Tango ad.
In the noughties we were all saying ‘wasaaaap’ to each other following another of Budweiser’s attempts to break the UK market. Notable also were Go Compare and Compare the Market; creating characters so annoying they became lovable – to sell insurance of all things.
The 2010s got us all weepy over a new trend of highly produced Christmas ads from the likes of John Lewis and Sainsbury’s. We were all asking each other: ‘have you seen it yet?’ and ‘did you cry?’
And for the 2020s… well for the decade we’re currently all living through we couldn’t collectively come up with one.
Has creativity died? Not according to the cubicle doors in the bathrooms of the Crooked Billet pub in Penge it hasn’t. We’re still churning out imaginative, funny and engaging content at a far greater rate than at any point in the past.
One-to-one
The way we’re consuming media clearly has changed over the last decade. For most of us this means that we now see more ads on our phones than on our TVs.
This has given smaller advertisers a significant leg-up. No longer do you need a huge telly budget to launch a successful campaign. Mobile ads can be efficiently targeted and measured to such a degree that even modest budgets can now be ruthlessly efficient at delivering ROI for advertisers.
As a result – we’ve seen the dominance of many major advertisers challenged in recent years. Gillette has haemorrhaged market share to smaller upstarts such as Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club and Nike and Adidas are conceding shelf space to brands such as Hoka, On, Skechers, Salomon and New Balance.
In the 90s – dominating share of voice on TV gave a brand a social proofing effect. You wouldn’t dare turn up for PE in anything other than Nike or Adidas trainers – although maybe I’d be an engineer today if I’d rocked a pair of Hokas during volleyball.
How Humans Decide
Brands are still important – but today information plays a far stronger role in our purchase decisions.
Research from the University of Oxford and WPP in 2025 showed that reviews and personal recommendations play a significantly more important role in our purchase decisions than paid-for media touchpoints.
We prefer to research our purchases rather than let the brand with the biggest media budget tell us what to buy.
The power of recommendation
I was at a networking event with an agency partner a few weeks back. I hate these events – normally you’ll find me deliberating for a little bit too long over the pastry selection or looking seriously at imaginary emails on my phone.
Thankfully there were beers at this one and so I found myself in conversation with one of the hosts – the conversation turned to our smartwatches.
I’ve been very happy with my Apple Watch over the last few years but she, a runner, was a firm ambassador for her Garmin.
Over the next twenty minutes I learned that hers has a weeklong battery life, has introduced ‘Garmin Pay’, measures VO2 max for cycling activities (Apple just does running and walking) and can broadcast heart rate data to other devices – including my bike computer.
This would mean that if I had a Garmin, I wouldn’t lose any functionality, would have to charge less frequently and wouldn’t need to wear a separate heart rate chest strap for cycling.
That conversation was easily the single most effectual touchpoint Garmin has had, or likely will ever have with me. And yet, they didn’t plan for it, won’t learn about it, and won’t attribute it as the reason my next smart watch purchase will likely be one of theirs.
