Ted Lasso's Origin Story

This week on our Season 2 finale, we speak with one of the living legends of the advertising business, art director Amil Gargano. Now 90 years old, Amil was a co-founder of Ally & Gargano, one of the most revered agencies of the '60s and '70s, famous for its take-no-prisoners style and pioneering use of comparative advertising. I spent an afternoon with Amil recently, and this episode has excerpts from that conversation—as we touch on his career, his celebrated work, and his close yet combustible relationship with Carl Ally, the tempestuous other half of Ally & Gargano.

Ted Lasso is one of the most beloved shows on TV. But not many people realize the character originated in an ad campaign, a decade ago, for NBC Sports and its Premier League coverage. This week, we look back at Ted's fascinating origin story: how Jason Sudeikis, the agency Brooklyn Brothers and the London club Tottenham Hotspur collaborated on two hilarious videos that got NBC's soccer coverage off to a flying start—and set Sudeikis and his team on an unlikely path to Emmy-winning glory.

This week on Tagline, we look back at the most startling brand statement on race from the emotional months after George Floyd's death: Beats by Dre's powerful two-minute film "You Love Me." We speak with the team who created the spot at the agency Translation—how they pivoted from a product campaign, partnered with A-listers led by Melina Matsoukas, went down a very different path than they expected to at first, and in the end achieved a remarkable double triumph: celebrating the beauty and resilience of Black America, while confronting white America for loving Black culture while hating Black people.

This week we revisit the "Live Test Series" of stunts for Volvo Trucks, crafted by the Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors, including "The Epic Split," the most famous of them all—yet in some ways also very much an outlier of the campaign. We speak with folks from the agency, as well as director Andreas Nilsson and stunt coordinator Peter Pedrero, about the long road to some of the best product demos ever made in advertising.

The metaverse may well be our future, but it's a metaverse parody that's gotten more attention this ad-award season. For this episode of Tagline, we sat down at Cannes Lions with folks from the agency SS+K and Visit Iceland to talk about "Welcome to the Icelandverse," the video from late last year that expertly spoofed Mark Zuckerberg's vision of our utopian virtual future—and offered a nonvirtual Iceland travel experience as a welcome alternative.

We're doing something a little different on Tagline this week. Instead of speaking with people about the ads they've made, we're asking them about the ads they love. We have stories from four top creatives today—Omid Farhang, Pum Lefebure, Walter Geer and Gerry Graf—about advertising that deeply influenced them. We hear about old ads, new ads, even some ads that made them want to work in advertising in the first place.

It was one of the great comic triumphs from the golden age of viral commercials: "The Bear," created by Paris agency BETC for the French TV network Canal+. This week on Tagline, we look at the making of the hilarious and wonderfully crafted 2011 spot, which won almost every ad award under the sun—and remains a high point of comedy advertising more than a decade later.

How do you hijack all 53 ads in the Super Bowl while buying just 90 seconds of airtime? P&G's Tide and Saatchi & Saatchi managed that remarkable feat in 2018 with "It's a Tide Ad," one of the most clever and entertaining campaigns ever to run on the game. This week, we revisit "Tide Ad" with its creators to learn the backstory, from the idea, to the craft, to the wild experience on game night, to the results—which included one of advertising's best-ever marriage proposals.

After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, two parents who lost their children that day—Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden—founded Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit devoted to protecting kids from guns by teaching people to recognize the warning signs of potential violence before it occurs. This week on Tagline, we look at the the group's remarkable PSAs over the past decade—created with BBDO New York and the Smuggler director Henry-Alex Rubin—and how the bravery, boldness and craft of their advertising work have changed the thinking, the conversation and the behavior around gun violence in America. Warning: There are sounds of gun violence in this episode that may be triggering, particularly from 15:25 to 15:32 and from 31:12 to 32:11.

In 1999, Bud Light and DDB Chicago premiered one of the great radio ad campaigns of all time, "Real Men of Genius." This week on Tagline, we dig into the campaign's greatest hits with folks on the agency, client and production sides—to see how a simple radio idea blossomed into a full-fledged entertainment franchise that spawned 200 spots over a decade, as well as TV ads, compilation CDs and even live events.