Volkswagen's legendary advertising under the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency trafficked in a classic folkloric convention also employed by Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Magoo: the "little man" innocently triumphing against the forces of impersonal bureaucracy. But after a quarter-century of brand decline following that triumph, VW saw that it needed a new flagship product and a fresh image. Enter the New Beetle, the Arnold Worldwide agency of Boston, and the replacement leitmotif: the boyfriend/girlfriend. This theme is made explicit in the mesmerizing "Bubble," the 60-second theatrical and television spot introducing the 2003 New Beetle Convertible. The stop-frame editing, the protagonist's shaggy haircut and vague yearnings, the glass-box and sky-bridge architecture, and the soundtrack -- Electric Light Orchestra's "Mr. Blue Sky" -- are derivative of 1960s Brit Pop. The relationship between car and owner in this and other spots in the "Drivers Wanted" campaign might seem curiously chaste. But first- and second-time buyers, VW's main market, are looking for romance more than passion. So are their moms, who were in grammar school when the original Beetle (and Beatles) made their mark, and for whom "cute" is safer than "sexy."

You're a new CEO following a legendary leader who turned your company around. You're about to stamp your imprint on the enterprise with a grand new strategy. How do you signal customers, Wall Street, and your employees? With a radically different ad campaign! Well, not if you're Samuel Palmisano. IBM's CEO knows the value of stability in the midst of change. Palmisano wants to drive Big Blue and its customers toward "on-demand computing" -- that is, the purchase of computing applications on a utilitylike basis. Wary buyers have been slow to shift. So Ogilvy & Mather has wrapped the message in executions that visually and musically capture the effect of its IBM efforts going back nearly five years. "UBA" depicts a serious salesman pitching to an earnest boardroom a Rube Goldbergian "universal business adapter" that "connects anything to everything." The spot's most prominent design element is the pair of blue bars that border the top and bottom of the screen. This approach turns the ho-hum, squarish TV into a more cinematic medium, and it has branded the company's messages since it began surfing the e-business wave. The old N.W. Ayer & Son agency used to advise its clients, "Keep everlastingly at it." Today, few do. But IBM is heeding the advice and, with a splash of blue, may do for Web services what Microsoft's billions cannot.

Nostalgia has long been an arrow in advertising's quiver. From the Quaker Oats Quaker to Buick's current campaign featuring legendary designer Harley Earl, "old and beloved" has always competed with "new and improved." Recently, however, the content of nostalgia has changed. Today, nostalgia is associated with television: the Old Navy campaign featuring the theme songs from Green Acres and The Brady Bunch, for instance, or Britney Spears's revival of old Pepsi jingles. An affecting rendition of nouvelle nostalgia comes in a new advertising effort created by Hill Holliday for Web portal Lycos. First, it doesn't rewrite the past: The theme song is Harry Nilsson's original "Best Friend" from sitcom The Courtship of Eddie's Father. Second, the campaign effectively evokes another advertising category, the "aspiration-with-athlete" (irony subgenre), which calls up everything from Joe Namath taking it all off for Noxzema to Michael Jordan denying that it's "gotta be" his Nikes. But what really makes this ad work is a giddily overstated Mark McGwire. Whether he's sticking french fries up his nose or pummeling the protagonist in a pillow fight, the St. Louis slugger acts like a man who's come through therapy the better for it -- an appropriate message for middle-aged men susceptible to the nostalgia pitch.

Extending a successful campaign is difficult, especially when that campaign is a quarter-century old and part of a marketer's DNA. Last year's FedEx effort, "Business Legends," built brilliantly on its communications heritage. Each spot by BBDO New York, FedEx's agency for the past 13 years, featured actors Steve Carell and Joe Narciso recollecting a potential business crisis solved by a FedEx offering. The executions mixed wit, speed, and in-your-face salesmanship -- hallmarks of the 1978-1983 "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight" launch campaign by Ally & Gargano. BBDO treated that legacy with respect -- not reverence. Now BBDO faces the challenge of refreshing "Legends" that are evolved from a legend. In its newest "thirties," FedEx has maintained certain elements: In "Otoscope," wordplay around the definition of "shenanigan" recalls last year's banter about "hobgoblin" -- while evolving the protagonists into subtle antagonists. The intense Carell is more overbearing, and Narciso, his foil, is more the buffoon. While the stories are more improbable, the sell is actually harder. For example, "Joe's FedEx Guy" spends almost its full span on the utility of corner drop boxes. Balancing slapstick and product benefits is absolutely, positively a neat trick -- especially after 24 years.

It's easy to be cynical about "green marketing" pitches, especially from Procter & Gamble, the world's largest producer of the packaged goods that typically antagonize the environmentally aware. But "Duck Talk," an ad for P&G's Dawn dishwashing soap that broke on August 1, is a beautiful example of the genre, and -- an added bonus! -- it's a subtle and effective product demonstration from a marketer that's always been long on effectiveness but short on subtlety. The spot, by the D'Arcy agency's New York office, depicts the defouling of a fowl soiled in an oil spill. It mimics a children's tale in several ways: Mark Mothersbaugh's simple synthesizer music emphasizes the 2/4, singsong beat of a folk tune. The opening phrase, "If this bird could talk," is repeated three times. The first quack punctuates the copy's initial sentence as if the bird were conversant. Finally, the duck's release concludes the narrative with a triumphant flourish. What the viewer will likely perceive only subconsciously is the sell. The product shot is understated, limited to one short initial portrayal and a blurred follow-up. And the entire commercial focuses only on softness, the sine qua non of dish detergents -- at least since the days of Palmolive kitchen soap, whose pitchwoman, Madge, cackled rather than quacked.

When people say of TV that the commercials are better than the programs, they don't know the half of it: Production costs on national-brand spots have risen so high that a slick 30-second ad can cost twice as much, pro rata, as a costly Hollywood blockbuster. Glossy production values, once the mark of a relative handful of brand marketers, are now a commodity -- putting even more of a premium on a strong, arresting idea.

That's why the New Balance athletic-shoe spots created by the infelicitously named Euro RSCG MVBMS Partners agency, which will run on national cable television through next month, are so appealing (and, by projection, effective).

One of the executions, "Thunderstorm," like so many other current ads, is gorgeous to look at and boasts its share of nice production tricks. Most notably, this includes the advancing storm, which evokes viewers' primal memories of Oz, just as for the hipness-obsessed ad industry, the advancing protagonist evokes more contemporary reflections of the cult flick Run Lola Run. But the joyful deliberateness with which the hard-charging Lola triumphs over the tempest -- and the understated admixture of athleticism and eroticism in her sinewy strides -- illustrate the commercial's thematic line, "What keeps you running?" The spot's subtle playfulness also contrasts with the humorlessness that has long dogged the women's segment in the competitive athletic-shoe category.