advertising slogans Archives - Retro Reminiscing Video and Pictures

As a kid growing up, I didn’t understand why everyone said “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee” was incorrect English. I just knew they made great baked products.

The famous Sara Lee campaign was built around that odd but unforgettable line:

“Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.”

It was catchy, a little strange, and maybe not what your English teacher wanted to hear, but that was the point. The double negative made people notice it, remember it, and repeat it.

The commercials usually showed off Sara Lee cakes, pies, pound cake, coffee cake, and other desserts that looked like they came from a bakery, even if they came from the freezer. For a lot of families, Sara Lee was the “company’s coming” dessert you could serve without doing all the baking yourself.

Looking back, the grammar may have been questionable, but the advertising worked. Everybody had foods they didn’t like, but the campaign wanted us to believe Sara Lee was the one thing nobody could turn down.

And honestly, as a kid, I wasn’t diagramming the sentence. I was looking at the cake.

https://www.theretrosite.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Virginia-slims.mp4

The Virginia Slims commercials were some of the most memorable cigarette ads of the late 1960s and 1970s, built around the famous slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

The campaign launched in 1968, aimed directly at women during the era of women’s liberation. The ads usually compared an old-fashioned scene of women being told what they couldn’t do with a modern, confident woman enjoying her independence. Then came the message: women had come a long way, and Virginia Slims was supposedly the cigarette made for them.

Looking back, it was clever marketing, but also pretty calculated. The ads borrowed the language of women’s progress to sell cigarettes. They made smoking look stylish, modern, and independent at a time when cigarette advertising was still everywhere.

For those of us who remember the commercials, the slogan is the thing that stuck. “You’ve come a long way, baby” became bigger than the product itself. It was catchy, bold, and very much of its time.

Today, the campaign feels like a time capsule: part advertising genius, part cultural manipulation, and a reminder of when cigarette commercials could still shape pop culture before they were banned from television in 1971.

Tag: advertising slogans

Nobody Doesn’t Like Sara Lee

Virginia Slims: “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby”