"Raid Kills Bugs Dead" Slogan
The product's advertising tagline, "Raid Kills Bugs Dead," was created by the advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding. The phrase itself is often attributed to the poet Lew Welch, who worked for the agency at the time.
The line was first used in commerce in 1966 and was trademarked in 1986. animation director Tex Avery was the producer of the first "Kills Bugs Dead" commercials. Artist Don Pegler developed the bug characters used in the US and continued animating them for forty years. Pegler "codified the look, feel and animation" of the weird insects that run in fear of Raid, said Steve Schildwachter, executive vice-president at Draftfcb.
The slogan has been part of a successful, long-running advertising campaign. Conjuring up images of an Eliot Ness-style raid on an illegal bar during Prohibition, the television spots have featured the cartoon bugs plotting some silly scheme like invading a kitchen, only to be foiled by the magical appearance of the product which swiftly dispatched the bugs to various giddily horrible deaths. The bugs would scream, "RAAAIIIID!" and then a huge cartoon-style explosion would occur.
Similar campaigns have been run in other countries, either by dubbing the US cartoons or by producing local versions.
Read more about this topic: Raid (insecticide)
Famous quotes containing the words raid, kills, bugs, dead and/or slogan:
“John Brown and Giuseppe Garibaldi were contemporaries not solely in the matter of time; their endeavors as liberators link their names where other likeness is absent; and the peaks of their careers were reached almost simultaneously: the Harper’s Ferry Raid occurred in 1859, the raid on Sicily in the following year. Both events, however differing in character, were equally quixotic.”
—John Cournos (1881–1956)
“As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is snowing and death bugs me
as stubborn as insomnia.
The fierce bubbles of chalk,
the little white lesions
settle on the street outside.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The living blind and seeing Dead together lie
As if in love . . . There was no more hating then,
And no more love; Gone is the heart of Man.”
—Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964)
“There is a grandeur in the uniformity of the mass. When a fashion, a dance, a song, a slogan or a joke sweeps like wildfire from one end of the continent to the other, and a hundred million people roar with laughter, sway their bodies in unison, hum one song or break forth in anger and denunciation, there is the overpowering feeling that in this country we have come nearer the brotherhood of man than ever before.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)