Messieurs Sterling, Cooper, Draper, and Pryce may have wiggled out from under the thumbs of their British overlords, but by February of 1964, our captains of advertising industry would’ve been trying to harness the power of a different kind of British Invasion.

On February 9, 1964, Liverpool’s The Beatles made their American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show and changed popular culture forever. An estimated 73 million people sat glued to their television sets for a performance of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, setting off tears in the eyes of their tween converts and dollar signs in the minds of ad men across the world—with an audience like that, Harry Crane’s TV department had to sit up and take notice. The song quickly shot to Number One, and young Sally Draper would surely have insisted both sides of her broken home take her to see movies like ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and ‘Help!’, campy rock romps that in which John, Paul, George, and Ringo got into scrapes, played their way out of them, and tossed around their shiny hair in under 2 hours, paving the way for tween-friendly behemoths like the Jonas Brothers and the American Idol franchise.

The Beatles would appear on Ed Sullivan’s variety program throughout ‘64 and ‘65 to great fanfare, but that first fateful night still holds a place in the record books as the highest rated network telecast of all time.

footnote by - Angela Serratore

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