Watch the full ad here:

Tom's thoughts:

"Schhh… you-know-who’ by Ogilvy for Schweppes (1965)

BAM! A wrecking ball smashes into a suburban house. Amidst the chaos, an unflappable spokesman sips product as the walls crumble around him.

The script for some bleeding-edge, celeb-backed stunt from Liquid Death? Or perhaps a gen-z influencer peddling their new energy drink?

Nope. This is a 1965 Schweppes ad from Ogilvy.

I love this film because of how fresh it feels, despite being a venerable 60 years old. It's stuffed full of the stunts, tricks and tropes we're still using now:



The deadpan wit of the talent - calm while the world collapses - has a whiff of Old Spice.

The audacity of demolishing an actual house? Defo the kind of stunt some monied-up mega-influencer might stage for clicks.

Even the swinging lightbulb gag anticipates Brad Pitt’s so-bad-it's-good Dior 'trapped in a shed' monologue from 2012.

Most 'radical' of all? The brand itself is never shown or mentioned. Just “Schhh! You-know-who” plus a very coy packshot featuring half the label. Cropping out the logo of a venerable brand? Ad juries are still lapping this stuff up in 2025 (see: 'The OG' for Kellogg's from Leo Burnett, or the 'windows' campaign by Uncommon for British Airways).

This film demonstrates the enduring power of these kinds of counter-intuitive creative thoughts – here's a script that clearly isn't the result of some half-baked client mandate or an onerous pre-testing regimen. Instead it bears all the hallmarks of wonderful, flawed, creative humans.

As the AI slop tsunami threatens to take our jobs and drown us all in mediocre thinking, films like this are a timely reminder of how much you can do with just a man, a house, a giant wrecking ball and a bottle of tonic."