Levi Strauss & Co.

"Launderette" TV ad for 501 jeans, 1985 Probably the most effective jeans commercial ever made. First shown to British viewers on Boxing Day 1985, the Bartle Bogle Hegarty spot has model Nick Kamen walk into a laundromat, strip to his boxers and wash his 501s while Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" plays. Levi's itself cites estimates that sales rose by as much as 800 percent, a figure nobody has pinned to hard data but which shows how far the ad turned a tired basic into something young Europeans wanted. Its wider legacy is the use of an old soul record to sell clothes, a trick advertisers have repeated ever since.