From Happy Meal toys to cereal box giveaways, Lee Bofkin of Global Street Art delves deep into his agency’s archives to search out the best branded products.
In the world of advertising, the objects a brand touches often tell stories as powerful as the product itself. Happy Meal toys talk to the importance of the youngest customers to McDonald’s. The many packs of Guinness-branded playing cards talk to the history of pubs and games. The list is endless.
At Global Street Art, we often find inspiration not just from the murals we paint but from the objects that brands have left behind, some of which have found their way into our gallery. Nestled among the 100,000 objects in our collection, these relics are quick reminders of how deeply brands are embedded in our everyday lives, both showing up and shaping popular culture.
Power of everyday
Objects carry a brand’s legacy. They freeze a brand’s graphics and identity in time. And despite changes, they also show what hasn’t changed. The consistency of a product and parts of its aesthetic over time make up a brand’s heritage – and customers put a lot of trust and comfort in familiar brands.
Take Cadbury, for example. In our gallery, we have old wrappers, shop advertisements, and even paper bags, all showcasing the evolution of one of the most iconic chocolate brands. Each piece shows the 200-year-old company at a different point in time – but what’s quite remarkable is what hasn’t changed. Cadbury has successfully navigated changing tastes while always feeling familiar.
The attention to detail by the craftsmen and women that produced the objects in our gallery keeps us on our toes, and humble, when we paint our huge branded murals. No matter how good our artists are as creative practitioners today, we are just part of a long lineage of the creatives who came before us.
Celebrating the people and efforts of the past gives customers a level of comfort and reassurance while inspiring what comes next. That’s why we look at heritage and allow it to inspire us.
A brand story
Sometimes, the objects brands leave behind are surprising. Burberry might be thought of as the makers of iconic trench coats, but in our collection, it’s a booklet from 1957 detailing sporting events that stands out.
It’s an unexpected association – a brand known for fashion, captured in the context of sport, and presented alongside prints of then-iconic British artists. Yet, that connection speaks to Burberry’s heritage in practical, high-quality outerwear originally designed for sportsmen and soldiers.
It also allows Burberry to work with art and artists today naturally and authentically – it’s simply a continuation of something they have been doing for decades upon decades.
Another favorite in our collection is Guinness. You’ll find beermats, playing cards, tea towels, a toucan jug, and even Guinness-branded condoms (I don’t think they’re flavored, but I haven’t tried).
Guinness is a master at injecting playfulness into its brand while maintaining that sense of legacy and authenticity. Their famous advertising mascot, the toucan, speaks to the power of visual identity – recognizable, playful, and still distinctly “Guinness.”
The collector’s eye
Brands like Kellogg’s have built empires on playful engagement. In our gallery, we have folders and folders of old cereal boxes, cereal giveaway toys, and even an incredibly fun 1909 Kellogg’s giveaway cereal book that highlights the brand’s long-standing connection with childhood, nostalgia, and mornings spent around the breakfast table.
For McDonald’s, it’s Happy Meal bags, toys, and a lot of characters – like Grimace, the Hamburglar, Mayor McCheese, and, of course, Ronald McDonald.
These insights and realizations, especially when we have the brand in the room, help strip brands back to their essence: the things that have been consistent for longer than we can remember. It then inspires the work we do after.
HMV is another brand whose history is well-represented in our gallery, with objects ranging from a Nipper (the dog) statuette, paper bags from record shops, and tins and tins of gramophone needles. The brand’s identity is tied so closely to music that even its marketing materials evoke a time when people connected deeply with physical music formats.
What’s interesting to me about these objects is they have survived in a way digital objects wouldn’t. They’re cool because they’re old, and they’re there in front of me, tactile and real. TikTok is very “now”: we don’t look back at what was hot a year ago. I think it’s a little sad that our digital lives don’t allow the opportunity to evoke nostalgia in the same way that real things can.
Marketing today focuses on performance and conversion, for which the digital world is great. Metrics abound. But the performance stuff works best when there’s also brand stuff to back it up. I can’t imagine there are many metrics for how cool it is to hold a 120-year-old comic book that came free with someone’s morning cereal.
Looking around our gallery, these objects are a reminder that the way brands touch people is often through the unexpected. In a world where so much is fleeting, it’s the brands that leave something behind – whether on a wall or in an object – that will stay with us for years to come.
