What you will find in the article:
- Historical figures are effectively used in modern advertising.
- CGI and AI help bring icons like Salvador Dalí to life.
- Campaigns creatively connect past events with contemporary brands.
- Bertha Benz's story highlights women's contributions to automotive history.
- JFK's speech was digitally reconstructed 55 years after his assassination.
Napoleon sold cars and beer, Cleopatra promoted chocolate and cosmetics, Einstein became a symbol of genius, Edison of ingenuity, and Leonardo da Vinci of boundless human creativity. The advertising world has always had a soft spot for the great figures of history. A famous name works as an effective shortcut: within seconds, it can trigger associations that would otherwise take an entire brand story to build.
Today, however, the hero of an advertisement does not necessarily have to be an actor dressed in period costume. Mahatma Gandhi can communicate via the internet, technology can create a painting Rembrandt never painted, John F. Kennedy can deliver a speech he never had the chance to give because of his assassination, and Salvador Dalí can return to museum visitors more than thirty years after his death. With the help of CGI, data and artificial intelligence, advertising can rewrite or extend the past — and even bring major historical figures back to life.
A Historical Figure Is a Brand in Their Own Right
Historical personalities are almost ideal protagonists for advertising. They come with their own “brand”, established long before marketing departments ever existed: a story, iconography, values and reputation. The most interesting campaigns in our selection go far beyond simply pairing a famous face with a product. They play with history, connect the past with the present, or turn a familiar story on its head so that it begins to say something new about the brand itself.
To conclude our summer series on historical figures in advertising, let us take a look at several remarkable campaigns from recent decades.
What If Gandhi Had Had the Internet?
The 2004 “Gandhi” commercial for Telecom Italia, directed by Spike Lee, is built around a simple idea: what impact could Gandhi’s message have had if he had access to modern communication technologies?
In the film, Gandhi delivers a speech that reaches people around the world through the internet, mobile phones and large outdoor screens. The advertisement connects the historical figure with the brand’s central message — technology’s ability to overcome distance and spread information. It closes with the question: “What if he could communicate like this?”
The commercial won a Bronze Lion at Cannes Lions in 2005 and, in 2012, received the Best Ever Forever award as part of Italy’s Key Award competition.
Video: Telecom Italia – Gandhi
The commercial was created long before today’s boom in generative artificial intelligence, yet it already works with a principle that is becoming increasingly popular in advertising: rather than showing history as it happened, imagining how it might have unfolded.
Bertha Benz: Sometimes the Best Story Is Your Own
Mercedes-Benz did not have to search the history books for a famous historical figure. It already had an extraordinary personality in its own history. Bertha Benz, wife and business partner of Carl Benz, set off with her sons from Mannheim to Pforzheim in 1888. The journey of roughly one hundred kilometres became the world’s first long-distance automobile trip. Among other things, Bertha wanted to demonstrate that her husband’s invention was not merely a technical curiosity, but a genuinely practical means of transport. In 2019, Mercedes-Benz transformed her story into an almost four-minute film, Bertha Benz: The Journey That Changed Everything. The premiere was symbolically scheduled for International Women’s Day. The result is neither a history lesson nor a conventional automotive commercial. The film presents Bertha as someone who had the courage to do something those around her did not believe was possible. The advertising film also impressed industry juries. It won several awards at Cannes Lions and collected further honours at the London International Awards, Epica Awards and ADC Europe.
Video: Mercedes-Benz – Bertha Benz: The Journey That Changed Everything
In this case, the historical figure works even better than a “borrowed celebrity”. Bertha Benz is not lending Mercedes her story. She is part of the story herself.
Rembrandt Painted a New Picture. 347 Years After His Death
Dutch bank ING went one step further. In 2016, it introduced “The Next Rembrandt”, a project that used data, deep learning, facial recognition and 3D printing to create a new portrait in the style of Rembrandt. Alongside ING, the project involved partners including Microsoft, TU Delft, the Mauritshuis and the Rembrandt House Museum.
Video: The Next Rembrandt
The project is particularly fascinating from a buzz-marketing perspective. According to agency VML, it generated approximately 1.8 billion media impressions. The campaign collected more than 60 international awards and won two Grand Prix at Cannes Lions — in the Cyber and Creative Data categories. It is not difficult to see why. By combining a universally recognised cultural icon with new technology, the campaign created a topic that extended far beyond the boundaries of paid advertising. People were no longer talking only about ING. They began debating whether the result was genuinely art, whether creativity could be translated into data and whether technology could replace the artist. The advertising project thus sparked a broader cultural debate. Given today’s rapid rise of generative AI, the 2016 “The Next Rembrandt” campaign now seems almost prophetic.
Kennedy’s Speech Was Heard 55 Years After His Assassination
Perhaps the most powerful example of advertising “rewriting history” is “JFK Unsilenced”, a project created by agency Rothco for British newspaper The Times. John F. Kennedy was due to speak at the Dallas Trade Mart on 22 November 1963. He never had the opportunity to deliver his speech — he was assassinated while travelling through Dallas. Symbolically, he was finally given the chance to deliver it 55 years later. Over the course of eight weeks, technology company CereProc analysed recordings of 831 Kennedy speeches and interviews and broke his voice down into more than one hundred thousand phonetic units. These audio units were then used to create a recording of the prepared speech in a digitally reconstructed version of Kennedy’s voice.
Video: The Times – JFK Unsilenced
The campaign succeeded in transforming a technological demonstration into an emotional story. At Cannes Lions 2018, it won, among other honours, the Grand Prix in the Creative Data category and seven Lions in total. Its later tally reached 55 international awards and eight Grand Prix. According to Marketing.ie, the project reached 51 million people on Twitter, generated one billion global media impressions and resulted in more than 4,500 registrations for The Times and The Sunday Times.
Dalí Returned. And Took Selfies With Visitors
Salvador Dalí is probably one of those historical figures who might have found his own digital resurrection rather entertaining. The Dalí Museum in Florida, together with agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, created the “Dalí Lives” project in 2019, allowing the surrealist painter to “communicate” with visitors again more than thirty years after his death. The creators drew on Dalí’s interviews, books, letters and archival materials. His likeness was created using machine learning, his personality was reconstructed from his own words preserved in interviews, books and letters, and his voice was recreated through sound engineering. The result was not a single video, but an interactive installation. A total of 125 different videos and 190,512 possible combinations were created, allowing Dalí to respond to visitors in different ways. And at the end, he could even take a selfie with them.
Video: Dalí Lives – The Master of Surrealism Is Back
More than 25,000 people experienced Dalí Lives during its first month, campaign trailers were viewed in more than one hundred countries, and thirty years after his death, Dalí once again became a trending topic on Twitter. It is not difficult to understand why. There is something particularly fitting about taking a photograph with a digital version of an artist who spent his entire life challenging the boundary between reality and dreams. The project subsequently also achieved success at advertising competitions including The One Show and the Webby Awards.
When Celebrities Come Back to Life
The digital “resurrection” of historical figures also raises new ethical questions. When an actor merely portrays Napoleon in an advertisement, it is clear that the performance is an interpretation. But when technology creates a highly realistic likeness of a real person and makes that person speak or act in their own name, a question arises as to whether they themselves would have agreed to such a use of their identity. One technological milestone came in 2013. Chocolate brand Galaxy featured Audrey Hepburn in a commercial twenty years after her death. This was not simply a matter of inserting archival footage. Visual effects studio Framestore created her face entirely in CGI and digitally combined it with footage of body doubles. According to Framestore, production was preceded by two months of research and followed by five months of post-production. A core team of twelve artists worked on the project, and the necessary rights were provided by Audrey Hepburn’s sons, Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Luca Dotti.
Video: Galaxy Chocolate – Audrey Hepburn
The result was technically convincing enough to become one of the early examples in the debate surrounding digital resurrection — the return of deceased celebrities through technology. And it was far from the only one.
Bruce Lee Sold Whisky, Even Though He Did Not Drink Alcohol
That same year, a 90-second film titled “Game Changer” appeared in China for Johnnie Walker Blue Label. Standing on a terrace in Hong Kong, Bruce Lee speaks about his famous philosophy of water, fluidity and the ability to change the world. By the time the campaign was created, however, Lee had been dead for almost forty years. His likeness was created using CGI by The Mill. The commercial was filmed with actor Danny Chan, whose performance served as the basis for the digitally recreated Bruce Lee. His daughter Shannon Lee was also involved in the project, helping the creators ensure that both her father’s appearance and philosophy were represented faithfully.
Video: Johnnie Walker – Bruce Lee: Game Changer
The technological achievement attracted admiration, but also controversy. According to contemporary media reports, Bruce Lee did not drink alcohol, which some fans saw as being in direct conflict with the promotion of whisky. Shannon Lee argued that she viewed the project more as a brand-funded tribute to her father than as a conventional product endorsement — Lee does not hold a bottle in the film, nor does he explicitly recommend the whisky. That, however, did not prevent a debate over whether the consent of surviving family members can ever fully replace the consent of the person themselves. It is an important ethical question for contemporary advertising. Technology can already bring a deceased person back into a commercial. But that does not necessarily mean a brand can determine whether that person would have wanted to appear in it.
From Period Costume to Artificial Intelligence
Over the course of just a few decades, the way historical figures are used in advertising has changed dramatically. The simplest option remains an actor in costume. The next step is historical fiction. Gandhi gets access to the internet. In the Dodge Challenger “Freedom” commercial, for example, George Washington arrives at a battle not on horseback, but behind the wheel of a car. The brand changes familiar history to create a surprising punchline. Then comes authentic brand heritage, as in the case of Bertha Benz. The historical figure is not a borrowed celebrity, but part of the brand’s own story. And finally, there is technological reconstruction. Rembrandt “paints” a new picture. Kennedy delivers a speech that was never heard. Dalí talks to museum visitors. Audrey Hepburn enjoys chocolate and Bruce Lee reflects on philosophy in a whisky commercial.
A famous face alone, however, does not guarantee success. The strongest campaigns in our selection share one thing: there is a meaningful connection between the personality, the story and the brand. When a brand uses a historical icon simply because they are famous, the result can easily become little more than a period-costume joke or a flashy technological demonstration. And when creatives digitally work with someone who can no longer give their consent, one further essential condition comes into play: respect for their legacy.