The good old ’60s

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: If you remember the ’60s, as a popular saying goes, you probably weren’t there. No matter. Madison Avenue is taking you back with a skein of campaigns celebrating sights and sounds of the decade.

The ads are filled with images like Volkswagen buses festooned with groovy graffiti, daisies and other power flowers, peace signs, psychedelic drawings in DayGlo colours and hair, long beautiful hair, shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen (to quote a lyric from the era).

Music, too, is being used to invoke the 1960s. Commercials on television, radio and the Internet play tunes like Daydream by the Lovin’ Spoonful (1966), Gimme Some Lovin’ by the Spencer Davis Group (1967) and On the Road Again by Canned Heat (1968).

The trend may have started in summer 2006 when Ameriprise Financial introduced a campaign with Dennis Hopper, a symbol of the counterculture for his roles in films like Easy Rider. It has since expanded to brands like Geico insurance, Lucky jeans, Total cereal and US Trust.

What is most intriguing about the trend is that the ads present many of the contentious aspects of the ’60s—the protests, the hippies, the challenge to authority—in a positive, even romanticised light.

For instance, a trippy-looking commercial for Total, sold by General Mills, begins, The ’60s were about change, defying convention, and ends by proclaiming the cereal as the best breakfast “for mind and body”.

During the ’60s, mass marketers avoided such language, fearful of alienating mainstream consumers. The approach is also a far cry from the demonisation of the decade that still pervades political advertising, as evidenced by recent commercials for Senator John McCain, R-Ariz, that attacked Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY, as a product of the ’60s culture.

AmericanLife TV, which offers reruns of ’60s series like Lost in Space and Mission: Impossible, is changing its logo to a daisy from a star. The switch is meant to remind baby boomers of the “flower power” slogan as well as a commercial from the 1964 presidential campaign, titled Daisy, that portrayed Barry M Goldwater, who ran against Lyndon B Johnson, as a warmonger.

Geico is running a commercial and a print ad depicting a VW bus decorated with phrases like right on and far out. The ads are created by the Martin Agency in Richmond, Virginia, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.