The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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Kit Kat: Meccano
Any boy struggling to construct Meccano will deserve a chocolate break, though perhaps this won’t be as satisfying as completing the Meccano.
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Overview
This is one of very many Rowntree TV ads during the early 1960s which aimed to show the universal appeal of Kit Kats, each featuring a different everyday situation, or someone from a different occupation, breaking open a Kit Kat as if it was manna from heaven. Here we have an excited boy having a break from having to figure out the complexities of Meccano, the very popular boy’s hobby of the time.
This is one of a large collection of films made by Rowntree’s of York (now Nestlé), most of which are adverts for their confectionary products. The advertising idea of a ‘break’ was converted into the famous slogan ‘Have a Break, Have a Kit Kat’ in May 1957, along with the image of the broken bar, when the first advert appeared on commercial TV. The slogan was coined by Donald Gilles, an executive at advertising agency JWT in London. When TV advertising began in 1955 Rowntree was ready with a £50,000 budget, increasing to £650,000 by 1957, half their total advertising budget. By the 1960s Meccano sales were beginning to decline, so no doubt they would have been pleased to have this bit of publicity.
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