📣The Greats

Kotler trained as an economist under Milton Friedman at Chicago and Paul Samuelson at MIT — three of his teachers won Nobel Prizes — before concluding that economics treated demand as a given when demand was precisely the interesting problem. He switched to the unfashionable field of marketing to study how demand is actually created, applying economic and behavioral rigor to a discipline then dominated by war stories, and rewrote it into a science taught from his textbook.

In 1959 DDB had to sell Americans a small, odd-looking German car designed under the Nazi regime, barely a decade after the war, in a market worshipping tail fins. Instead of hiding the Beetle's weaknesses, Helmut Krone's stark layout and Julian Koenig's copy led with them: a tiny car photographed in an ocean of white space under the headline "Think small." Self-deprecating honesty did what bombast could not — the campaign made the Beetle an American icon and rewrote advertising's rules of tone.

Hired by the American Tobacco Company, Bernays staged the 1929 "Torches of Freedom" march: he arranged for young women to light Lucky Strikes while walking in New York's Easter parade, having tipped off photographers that suffragette-style protesters would defy the taboo on women smoking in public. Newspapers nationwide reported the choreographed moment as spontaneous news. Sales to women rose, the taboo eroded — and Bernays, who lived to 103, spent his later decades campaigning against the tobacco industry he had served.

For struggling Braniff International Airways in 1965 she rejected the industry's polite jingles and rebuilt the product itself as the advertisement: "The End of the Plain Plane" had the fleet painted in seven bright colors by designer Alexander Girard and hostesses dressed by Emilio Pucci. A decade later, with New York near bankruptcy and its streets a byword for danger, her agency's 1977 "I Love New York" campaign — with Milton Glaser's logo, famously sketched in a taxi, and Steve Karmen's jingle — helped talk a city back into existence.

When the Vichy regime's anti-Jewish statutes stripped Bleustein-Blanchet of his businesses in 1940, he escaped through Spain and joined the Free French forces as an airman. Returning to a liberated Paris in 1944 with his advertising empire confiscated and gone, he started Publicis again from zero — adding a market-research arm inspired by American methods, winning back French industry client by client, and in 1958 planting the flagship Publicis Drugstore on the Champs-Élysées as a statement that the firm, and French advertising, were back.

The line was nearly killed twice. It came from Polykoff's own life — her mother-in-law had once asked in Yiddish whether Shirley colored her hair — and Life magazine initially refused the ad, hearing sexual innuendo. Clairol's response was pure Hopkins: Life polled its own female staff, none of whom detected the double meaning, and the magazine relented. In the campaign's first decade, the share of American women coloring their hair rose from roughly one in fifteen to nearly half, and Clairol's sales multiplied.

Pandey's Fevicol work turned a glue sold to carpenters into Indian popular culture: the celebrated "Bus" film showed an impossibly overloaded rural bus — passengers clinging to every surface, nobody falling off — over the tagline "Fevicol ka jod hai, tootega nahin" ("It's a Fevicol bond, it won't break"), a joke every Indian understood without a product shot in sight. In 2014 his slogan "Ab ki baar, Modi sarkar" became the spine of a winning national election campaign, proof of how far his colloquial register carried.