What the Most Talked-About Ad of 1964 Still Teaches Video Editors Today

In September 1964, a single television commercial aired one time and was never paid to air again. It ran sixty seconds. A little girl stood in a sunlit field, pulling petals from a daisy and counting them out loud, her numbers drifting out of order the way a child's counting does. Her voice was replaced mid-breath by a different countdown, one ticking down to zero instead of up. The screen filled with a blast and a rising cloud, and a voice familiar to every American at the time delivered a closing line about the stakes of the choice ahead.

That ad became known simply as "Daisy," and it is still one of the most written-about, most studied, and most imitated pieces of persuasive video ever made. It was produced for a presidential campaign, and its creators, working out of the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach with the conceptual guidance of Tony Schwartz, built it entirely by hand, with no computer, no digital audio workstation, and no way to undo a mistake once it was made. You can watch a preserved copy of the original spot below.

What it actually took to build, with 1964 tools

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