Longest running ad campaigns ever

The newspaper ad for the Practical English Programme has been running since 1960. Photograph: Public Domain

It has outlived the greatest marketing campaigns of our time; the chimpanzees that drank tea, the gorilla playing the drums, even that bright orange man who used to attack Tango drinkers. But how has what is probably the longest-running advert in newspaper history managed to survive for nearly 50 years? While language, newspapers andadvertising have evolved around it, this simple ad has remained almost exactly the same.

The first thing that strikes you about the advert is that it reads like a newspaper article, complete with a headline asking, "Shamed by your English?" The text then claims that the solution is the Practical English Programme, a correspondence course in speaking and writing based out of Bowden Hall College in Cheshire.

The company's managing director, Ian Travis, estimates that 400,000 people have taken the course since its inception in the 1950s. There is, he says, no standard customer profile. People from all walks of life, from 15 to 90, have read the words "Shamed by your English?" and thought, Yes, yes I am. Tell me more.

But the advert's question hasn't always been the same. Numerous variations have been experimented with, such as "Does your English let you down?" or the more presumptuous "Why are you shamed by your English?" But the text has been left almost totally unaltered. Over the years, various photographs have been used as illustrations, although one in particular caught readers' eyes; a portrait of a man named Derek Derbyshire, an accountant who posed for a modelling agency while briefly out of work in the early 1960s. He was 33 at the time, and his fee for the shoot was three guineas. When, 37 years later, Derbyshire died, the Daily Telegraph printed an obituary, speculating that his face had appeared on their front page more often than the Queen, Tony Blair, "or even Posh Spice".

Bob Heap was managing director of the course in 1963, when it was known as the Psychology Publishing Company, a subsidiary of his father's mail-order business. "The original ad was written by an American copywriter for a company called Marcus Campbell in Chicago," he says. "We . . . well, the correct word is plagiarised, we plagiarised that ad – considerably amended, of course – in about 1960."

The irony of plagiarising an advert for your own writing course isn't lost on him, although he defends the decision. "We played about with the copy and we still could not find a formula that was as good as this one," he says. So why has it been so effective for so long? "One of the reasons is that initially the reader thinks it's part of editorial. We used to match the typefaces of the newspaper it was printed in."

Another explanation is that it often appeared on the front page, the most desirable spot in newspaper advertising. You might be surprised that a simple correspondence course was consistently able to afford such a prominent placement. Heap explains with a chuckle: "We never paid the full rate. We used to have arrangements with the advertising people of the major newspapers. When they hadn't sold a front-page ad, they'd ring us and offer it to us at a discount."

Heap estimates that the usual rate for a front page advert was £400 in 1963, and had risen to £1,900 by the time he retired in 1997. But the rising prices have never been a problem. "That advert paid for itself from the very first time it ran," he says with pride.

Travis points out that "we don't get offered the front page any more", but confirms that the advert continues to pay for itself. Although he has given it plenty of thought, he can offer no explanation for its success. "We have produced new adverts that we thought were better. We expected them to do really well but they've just been awful. When we switch back to this one the inquiries flood in again. I honestly don't know why it's so successful." All he knows is that he won't be retiring it any time soon.