In November 2013 Google released an advertisement called Reunion, made by Ogilvy & Mather India. Two old men, Baldev in India and Yusuf in Pakistan, were separated as children during the partition of 1947. Baldev’s granddaughter uses Google Search to find Yusuf’s family in Lahore.
Dawn reported that the film had been viewed more than 1.6 million times on YouTube. It wrote that it “struck a cultural chord with Indians and Pakistanis.”
The Indian Medical Association received 1.56 crore rupees for endorsing products of PepsiCo, among them Tropicana juice and Quaker Oats. In November 2010 the Medical Council of India declared the endorsements illegal.
In June 2013 the council’s ethics committee found four doctors guilty. A new board of the council later overturned the decision.
In December 2024 India’s Central Consumer Protection Authority fined three coaching institutes for misleading claims about the civil services exam. Vajirao & Reddy Institute had claimed “617 selections out of 933.” StudyIQ IAS had claimed “120+ selections.” Each of the two was fined 7 lakh rupees.
In 2025 the authority fined Vision IAS 11 lakh rupees. It had claimed “7 in Top 10 and 79 in Top 100 selections in CSE 2023.” By then the authority had fined 28 coaching institutes.
Under its Incredible India campaign, the Ministry of Tourism ran Atithi Devo Bhava, “the guest is god.” The words come from the Taittiriya Upanishad.
The actor Aamir Khan was the face of the campaign until 2016. When his role ended, the ministry said that the advertising agency, not the ministry, had hired him.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan ran for a second term with a television ad called “Prouder, Stronger, Better.” Its first words are “It’s morning again in America.”
The ad was written and narrated by Hal Riney. It is commonly known as “Morning in America.”
On a family trip in 1951, Kemmons Wilson found motel rooms “overpriced and uncomfortable.” On August 1, 1952, he opened the first Holiday Inn in Memphis. It had a pool, air conditioning, a restaurant, a telephone and television in the rooms, free ice and free parking. Children stayed free.
The first franchise followed in 1954. “Comprehensive operational standards produced uniformity in nearly every detail.” Within ten years there were about 500 Holiday Inns. Later the company’s advertising slogan was “The Best Surprise Is No Surprise.”
“Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.” The slogan “became strongly associated with the Trident brand.” When it was first used is not certain. Sources date the survey to the early 1960s or to 1976.
The wording is careful. The dentists were “surveyed,” and the advice is for “patients who chew gum.” The fifth dentist “usually recommended no gum at all.”
Mock apple pie looks and tastes like apple pie, but it contains no apples. The filling is made from crackers. The best-known recipe uses Ritz crackers, which Nabisco introduced in 1934.
The usual story is that the recipe was invented during the Great Depression. It is older. Newspapers printed apple-free apple pie recipes in 1857, and soda crackers were called for by 1869. The pie was “popular among pioneer families crossing the Great Plains.” One food writer calls the Depression story “untrue,” spread “probably by the Nabisco marketing folks.”
WD-40 was created in 1953 in San Diego by the Rocket Chemical Company to prevent rust in aerospace work. The first company to use it commercially was Convair, to protect the Atlas missile. The name records the 40th attempt.
Employees took cans home, and the product reached stores in 1958. In 2008 the company and members of its fan club published “The official list of 2,000 uses.”
On August 14, 1981, Ford Motor Company launched an advertising campaign with the slogan “Quality is Job 1.” The New York agency Wells, Rich, Greene produced it. More than 250 Ford employees appeared in the television commercials. The campaign ran for nearly 17 years. In 1998 Ford replaced it with “Better ideas. Driven by you.”
Ford reported a 25 percent improvement in quality between the 1980 and 1981 model years. Market research named the real employees as “the biggest reason for the campaign’s success.”
In 2025 Ford issued more than 150 recalls. The previous record for one year was 77, set by General Motors in 2014. Ford said the number of vehicles recalled “reflects our intensive strategy to quickly find and fix hardware and software issues.”