The Creatives Room

2000s Advertising

The 2000s was the decade advertising went digital. YouTube launched in 2005 and changed what 'going viral' meant forever. 'The Man Your Man Could Smell Like' was shared millions of times before social sharing was a formal strategy. Dove's 'Evolution' demonstrated that a single well-crafted film could earn more media coverage than a nine-figure media buy. Meanwhile, traditional craft didn't disappear - Honda's 'Cog' and Guinness 'Noitulove' raised the bar for what was possible in a television commercial.

The campaigns in this collection

1. The Naked Pint - Richard Oriolo · 2009

   Cover for a craft-beer guide. Replacing the foam head with raw hops and barley shows beer "naked" - stripped back to its natural ingredients, exactly the unadulterated approach the book promises.

2. The Defenestration of Bob T. Hash III - Random House · Thomas Beck Stvan · 2009

   Cover for David Deans's The Defenestration of Bob T. Hash III. The open window, empty cage and escaping feathers hint at the title's fall and flight - something (or someone) gone out the window.

3. Everything You Know - Barbara deWilde · 2009

   Cover for Zoe Heller's novel Everything You Know. The lurid duotone and cropped, watchful framing give an ordinary domestic moment a sense of secrets and unreliable memory - fitting the story's caustic narrator.

4. Me Funny - Peter Cocking · 2009

   Cover for Drew Hayden Taylor's anthology on First Nations humour. The kitschy old "Indian" trade-label imagery is reclaimed with a wink - the very stereotype the essays subvert, played for sly comedy.

5. Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth - Anchor · Gabriele Wilson · 2009

   Cover for Xiaolu Guo's Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth. The turned-away figure captures a young woman on the threshold - anonymous, hungry for a bigger life in modern China, her face still hidden.

6. How the Dead Dream - Counterpoint Press · Christopher Moisan · 2009

   Cover for Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream. The little herd of toy creatures in the gloom foreshadows the novel's grief over vanishing species - a menagerie reduced to plastic keepsakes.

7. Security - Farrar, Straus and Giroux · Jennifer Carrow · 2009

   Cover for Stephen Amidon's Security. The lone watching eye distils the novel's theme - a town where everyone is monitored, and safety and surveillance blur into one.

8. Eating Animals - Hamish Hamilton · gray318 · 2009

   gray318's cover for Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. Type made of shredded meat forces the subject onto the reader before a word is read - the uncomfortable reality behind the plate.

9. Manhood for Amateurs - Harper · Will Staehle · 2009

   Cover for Michael Chabon's essays Manhood for Amateurs. The old-fashioned gauge measuring the moods of being a man frames the book as an amateur's readout on husband-, father- and sonhood.

10. Honor Thy Father - Harper Perennial · Allison Saltzman · 2009

    Cover for Gay Talese's Honor Thy Father. The candid portrait of a real mafioso signals Talese's intimate, non-fiction deep-dive into a Mob family's private life.

11. Not That Kind of Girl - Harper · Leanne Shapton · 2009

    Cover for Carlene Bauer's memoir Not That Kind of Girl. The tentative, unfinished embrace suits a coming-of-age story of faith, desire and figuring out who you are.

12. The Commissariat of Enlightenment - Harper Perennial · Elizabeth Ackerman · 2009

    Cover for Ken Kalfus's The Commissariat of Enlightenment. The directing hand and lone hat evoke early-Soviet propaganda and surveillance - a novel about image-making, cinema and power.

13. Still Life - Houghton Mifflin · Christopher Moisan · 2009

    Cover for Melissa Milgrom's Still Life. A dead animal posed mid-snarl embodies the book's subject and its title pun - taxidermy freezing life in motion.

14. The American Civil War - Knopf · Barbara deWilde · 2009

    Cover for John Keegan's The American Civil War. The dense, clashing red-and-blue lettering evokes Union and Confederacy colliding - the conflict fought out in the typography itself.

15. The Brother Gardeners: - Knopf · Gabriele Wilson · 2009

    Cover for Andrea Wulf's The Brother Gardeners. The prize specimen blooms against black frame the book's 18th-century plant-hunters and the collecting mania that reshaped English gardens.

16. Black Seconds - Mariner Books · Christopher Moisan · 2009

    Cover for Karin Fossum's Black Seconds. An abandoned bike's shadow, its rider gone, chills instantly - the vanished child at the heart of the Scandinavian crime novel.

17. Labyrinths - New Directions · Rodrigo Corral · 2009

    Cover for Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths. Type dissolving into mirrored, receding perspective enacts the title - the reader lost in Borges's infinite corridors and reflections.

18. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives - Pantheon · Peter Mendelsund · 2009

    Cover for David Eagleman's Sum. Peeling back the black to glimpse the cosmos beneath literalises the book's premise - lifting the veil on forty imagined versions of what comes after death.

19. Tarzan's Tonsillitis - Pantheon · Frank Gargiulo · 2009

    Cover for Alfredo Bryce Echenique's Tarzan's Tonsillitis. The tied-up correspondence signals a love story told across years and continents through letters - a romance kept alive on paper.

20. Twelve Fingers - Pantheon · Evan Gaffney · 2009

    Cover for Jo Soares's Twelve Fingers. The book replacing the face gives the anarchist "biography" an anonymous, ever-shifting identity - a man defined only by the story told about him.

21. An Apology for Idlers - Penguin Books Ltd · David Pearson · 2009

    Cover for Robert Louis Stevenson's An Apology for Idlers. Leaving the ornate frame almost empty is the perfect joke - the blank space embodies idleness, doing gloriously little.

22. Consolation in the Face of Death - Penguin Books Ltd · David Pearson · 2009

    Cover for Samuel Johnson's Consolation in the Face of Death. The grave, monumental lettering on near-black befits a solemn meditation on mortality - words carved as if in memoriam.

23. On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings - Penguin Books Ltd · Phil Baines · 2009

    Cover for William James's On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings. Pairing the essay's own moving passage with the slaughterhouse engraving stages its argument - our comfort resting on suffering we refuse to see.

24. Decline of the English Murder - Penguin Books Ltd · David Pearson · 2009

    Cover for George Orwell's Decline of the English Murder. Framing the essay as a Sunday newspaper page recreates exactly the cosy domestic scene Orwell describes - feet up, tea poured, reading about a good murder.

Why this collection is worth studying

The 2000s is the decade where advertising fragmented. The era of a single dominant channel broadcasting to a captive mass audience ended, and with it came a decade of creative experimentation as agencies and clients figured out what the new rules were. The work that has lasted from this period is the work that understood that the internet doesn't amplify bad ideas - it just makes them louder faster.

See also

• Best Ads of the 1990s
• Best Ads of the 2010s