"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:
“Each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“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)
“White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.”
—Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
“Democratization is not democracy; it is a slogan for the temporary liberalization handed down from an autocrat. Glasnost is not free speech; only free speech, constitutionally guaranteed, is free speech.”
—Gail Sheehy (b. 1937)