Poacher turned gamekeeper: Why the past keeps coming back

By Laurence Lee, director of media

The power of nostalgia. If you log on to Google right now you won’t be able to escape the Sesame Street 40^th birthday celebrations. Can it be true that a brand that was launched in 1969 is still sufficiently powerful now to get a nod from Google?

Why do some things last and others don’t? My own daughters and their friends have provided quite a good test bed for my pet theories on why some modern kids’ entertainment seems to me to be over-complicated, banal and unappealing to small children compared to what I grew up with. Given a straight choice between new cartoons, for instance, or Camberwick Green, our three year old goes for Windy Miller every time. (Incidentally, parents, do check out the episode where Windy Miller takes on Jonathan Bell, the modern farmer – Windy Miller turns out to be a champion of the slow food movement and organic chicken farming. Hilarious).

There’s an eternal attraction in simple things. Give kids a choice between some cardboard boxes to build a den with or a two hundred pound maze, they’ll take the boxes. The same goes for TV. Make it simple, innocent, reassuring and mildly educational and you’ll win over the kids and their parents at the same time.

As adults we keep coming back to what is simple, because it reminds us of what we were like as kids. This is why brands keep playing the nostalgia card, especially in turbulent times. Everything seemed so much more safe, easy and ‘right’ back then. Look at the M&S anniversary product line, as well as its reimagining of the original M&S Penny Bazaar, or the Patak’s TV ads, which sell the myth of a happy, racially integrated Britain that surely didn’t exist in the 1950s.

Britain, at the moment, is a very uncertain place to be, with very few new ideas about how to make us safe and happy as a society – so it’s hardly surprising that instinctively we withdraw to trusted brands from our past. It wouldn’t do any harm for PRs and corporates to remind ourselves sometimes that slick and complicated marketing can often be confusing and alienating. Well done Sesame Street, and happy birthday.