Watch the full ad here:

Richard's thoughts:

"What kept viewers hooked on Nescafé Gold Blend?

When we think of cliff-hangers, we tend to picture the closing moments of gripping shows like The Sopranos or Game of Thrones. But one of the most effective cliff-hangers of all time didn’t come from a TV drama - it came from a coffee ad.

Between 1987 and 1993, Nescafé Gold Blend ran a series of 12 ads featuring two familiar British actors, Anthony Head and Sharon Maughan. A will-they/won’t-they flirtation played out like a soap opera, and each ad ended unresolved: would their romance ever progress?

The public was hooked. When it came to the finale, The Sun splashed the story on its front page, and thirty million viewers tuned in. There was even a bestselling book and an album that hit number three in the charts. Fifteen years later, the campaign was still remembered - and voted the most romantic ad of all time.

Crucially, it also worked commercially: sales of Nescafé rose 20% within 18 months and 70% by the campaign’s end.

Brewing curiosity: why did the ads work?

The answer lies in a psychological quirk discovered nearly a century earlier. In the 1920s, Bluma Zeigarnik was sitting in a Viennese café when she noticed something curious: waiters had perfect recall of unpaid orders, but once the bill was settled, the details vanished from memory. Intrigued, she decided to test her observation in the lab. Participants were asked to carry out tasks - puzzles, simple builds, bits of problem-solving. Half of them were allowed to finish the job. The rest were interrupted halfway.

Later, when questioned, the interrupted group remembered almost twice as much about what they’d been doing as those who’d completed their task. This became known as the Zeigarnik effect: unfinished business lodges in our minds more powerfully than completed work. That’s exactly what the Gold Blend couple tapped into. By never quite resolving their story, the ads stayed alive in viewers’ memories - and kept them coming back.

What can we learn?

Most advertisers tie everything up neatly in 30 seconds. But neat is forgettable. If you want to be remembered, create a little tension — leave something hanging. An unanswered question or an unresolved mystery will keep your ads percolating in people’s minds."