Coca Cola Christmas Hilltop “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” TV Commercial.

Coca-Cola is a carbonated soft drink sold in stores, restaurants, and vending machines in more than 200 countries. It is produced by The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia, and is often referred to simply as Coke (a registered trademark of The Coca-Cola Company in the United States since March 27, 1944). Originally intended as a patent medicine when it was invented in the late 19th century by John Pemberton, Coca-Cola was bought out by businessman Asa Griggs Candler, whose marketing tactics led Coke to its dominance of the world soft-drink market throughout the 20th century.

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Retro Budweiser Christmas Commercial with the Clydesdales.

Budweiser is a 5.0% American-style lager introduced in 1876 by Adolphus Busch and one of the highest selling beers in the United States. It is made with up to 30% rice in addition to hops and barley malt.  Budweiser is produced in various breweries located around the world. It is a filtered beer available in draught and packaged forms.

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Woolworths Group plc was a listed British company that owned the high-street retail chain, Woolworths, as well as other brands such as the entertainment distributor Entertainment UK and book and resource distributor Bertram Books. The Woolworths store chain, which had more than 800 stores at its peak, was the main enterprise of the group, selling many goods and having its own LadyBird children’s clothing ranges, Chad Valley toys and the WorthIt! value ranges. The chain was the UK’s leading supplier of Candyking “pick ‘n’ mix” sweets. It was also sometimes referred to as “Woolies” by the UK media and the general public.

On 26 November 2008, the trading of shares in Woolworths Group plc was suspended and the Woolworths and Entertainment UK subsidiaries entered administration. Woolworths Group plc also entered administration on 27 January 2009. The administrators Deloitte & Touche closed all 807 Woolworths stores between 27 December 2008 and 6 January 2009 resulting in 27,000 job losses.

On 2 February 2009 it was announced that the Shop Direct Group had purchased the Woolworths and Ladybird names and these would survive as a brand within the internet based shopping company.

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Warninks Advocaat advert from circa 1980

Trivial Pursuit is a board game in which progress is determined by a player’s ability to answer general knowledge and popular culture questions. The game was created in 1979 in the southern Spanish city of Nerja by Canadian Scott Abbott, a sports editor for The Canadian Press, and Chris Haney, a photo editor for Montreal’s The Gazette. After finding pieces of their Scrabble game missing, they decided to create their own game. With the help of John Haney and Ed Werner, they completed development of the game, which was released in 1982.

In North America, the game’s popularity peaked in 1984, a year in which over 20 million games were sold. The rights to the game were licensed to Parker Brothers (now part of Hasbro) in 1988, after initially being turned down by the Virgin Group; in 2008, Hasbro bought out the rights in full, for US$80 million.^[3] As of 2004^[update], nearly 88 million games had been sold in 26 countries and 17 languages. Northern Plastics of Elroy, Wisconsin produced 30,000,000 games between 1983 and 1985. An online version of Trivial Pursuit was launched in September, 2003.

Dozens of question sets have been released for the game. The question cards are organized into themes; for instance, in the standard Genus question set, questions in green deal with science and nature. Some question sets have been designed for younger players, and others for a specific time period or as promotional tie-ins (such as Star Wars, Saturday Night Live, and The Lord of the Rings movies).

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BOOTS Christmas Advert 1980

Woolworth Christmas advert from 1983

Christmas advert from Schweppes ‘ Schhh… You Know Who’

Schweppes is a beverage brand that is sold around the world. It includes a variety of carbonated water and ginger ales. Its marketing campaign made heavy use of an onomatopoeia in their commercials: “Schhhhh…. Schweppes,” after the sound of the gas escaping as one opens the bottle.

History

In the late eighteenth century, Johann Jacob Schweppe (1740–1821), a German-born naturalised Swiss watchmaker and amateur scientist developed a process to manufacture carbonated mineral water, based on a process discovered by Joseph Priestley in 1770, founding the Schweppes Company in Geneva in 1783.  In 1792 he moved to London to develop the business there. Mainstay products include ginger ale (1870), bitter lemon (1857), and tonic water (The oldest soft drink in the world – 1771).

An ad campaign in the 1950s and 1960s featured a real-life veteran British naval officer named Commander Whitehead, who described the product’s bubbly flavor (effervescence) as “Schweppervescence”.

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1984 Christmas advert from MB games for the game My Dog Has Fleas!

The Milton Bradley Company is an American game company established by Milton Bradley in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1860. In 1920, it absorbed the game production of McLoughlin Brothers, formerly the largest game manufacturer in the United States and in 1987 it purchased Selchow and Righter, makers of Parcheesi and Scrabble.

Milton Bradley was taken over by Hasbro, Inc., in 1984. Now wholly owned by Hasbro, it is still retained as one of Hasbro’s brands, similar to the manner in which Parker Brothers is one of Hasbro’s brands. It is a board game and sometimes video game publisher. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Milton Bradley marketed a series of games (such as HeroQuest) in North America that were developed in the United Kingdom by Games Workshop (GW) that drew heavily from GW’s Warhammer Fantasy universe, albeit without explicit reference to the Warhammer product line. Milton Bradley also developed numerous game consoles such as the Microvision and Vectrex.

Milton Bradley was sued by two men, Alan Coleman and Roger Burten, who claimed to have presented the original concept for Dark Tower to Milton Bradley in the late 1970s, at which point, MB declined to pursue it, but thereafter “independently” developed the game^[1]. One of the Dark Tower game designers claims the court’s decision was unfair^[2]. As part of the resolution of the lawsuit, Milton Bradley pulled the game off the market, and it was never republished.

James J. Shea was the board chairman of the Milton Bradley Company who rescued the company from going into bankruptcy.

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Scalextric advert from Christmas 1980