"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)
“It kills me to be time’s eunuch and never to beget.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“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)
“Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.”
—Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)
“The slogan offers a counterweight to the general dispersion of thought by holding it fast to a single, utterly succinct and unforgettable expression, one which usually inspires men to immediate action. It abolishes reflection: the slogan does not argue, it asserts and commands.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)