Watch the full ad here:

Paul's thoughts:

"One of the first accounts I worked on as a planner at BMP in 1975/6 was the Smash Martians. We travelled around the country, as we did then, with enormous video players and animatics, finding out from the public just what the Martians could or couldn’t do, just what it was that made them funny and sympathetic, or not as the case might be. We discovered, for instance, that they shouldn’t ever meet with earthlings, nor enthuse about the product’s taste. Their role was to laugh at us, from a distance.

In this way, the campaign developed over a number of years. But it’s interesting to remember that the original Martians ad – completed well before I even joined the agency – was never intended as part of a campaign. When Chris Wilkins and Roger Shipley had a crazy idea in the pub, and John Webster visualized it and Bob Brooks and many other people brought it to life, nobody imagined that this would be more than a one-off illustration of our general positioning of Smash as the modern way of making mashed potato.

It was only after we realised from research how popular the Martians were among the public that they became a brand property (or as they say today, a distinctive asset). And that’s not unusual – many famous brand characters or mascots, like Gary Lineker for Walker’s Crisps or the Dulux Dog or the Andrex puppies were conceived as single ads, not as campaigns. They came back, and lasted in some cases for decades, because of popular demand – and, perhaps, because we carefully managed their development in order to keep them popular."