Brow Beat

Why Does Willy Wonka’s “Pure Imagination” Keep Showing Up in Advertisements?

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As Willy Wonka opens the doors to his Chocolate Room in the original film adaptation of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory , leading his visitors along the banks of a chocolate river, he sings a song about the power of imagination. “Come with me, and you’ll be, in a world of pure imagination,” he promises. “Take a look, and you’ll see, into your imagination.” If you feel like you’ve heard ” Pure Imagination ” recently, it’s probably because it’s playing in an AT&T commercial currently in heavy rotation. Previously, versions of the song have also popped up in ads for MasterCard and a Lenovo laptop. Why is this song so popular among advertisers?

Commercials that use the song employ the Wonka association to inspire a sense of childish wonder in viewers, and follow in Wonka’s footsteps by using that wonder to sell products, though to varying degrees of success. MasterCard released an ad in 2005 set to an upbeat, poppy cover of the song, in which a couple wanders around a candy store where cameras, iPods, and vacation options fill the bins instead of pralines and Gummy Bears. Willy Wonka’s fantastical dreams may have had commercial appeal (those golden tickets moved a lot of Wonka bars), but this ad and its soulless cover carry a slightly more sinister message: Your dreams are mere commodities. Even experiences—the moment you first see an elephant on an African safari, for example—can be packaged for purchase.

Other ads have stayed truer to the song’s lyrical mood. In 2007, Lenovo used the original version of the song to promote its “Thinkpad” laptop, in a commercial that demonstrates the computer’s durability. Among other things, the laptop is slammed against a wall in an automobile crash test, batted back and forth by astronauts in an anti-gravity room, submerged in water, held up to the sun in a desert, and frozen in liquid nitrogen, all while Gene Wilder’s voice croons dreamily in the background. “What we’ll see, will defy, explanation,” he trills. Modern science does just that, and the ad suggests that a computer is the doorway to countless other marvels. The song helps transform the computer from a banal necessity into something as enchanting—and enduring—as an Everlasting Gobstopper.

In AT&T’s current ad, “Pure Imagination” plays in the background as the camera pans across a city, where buses and pedestrians share the streets with a rainbow train, a purple creature with three eyes, and other fantastical images, all in the style of children’s drawings. The conceit: Anything is possible with an AT&T phone, just like anything is possible in the world of a 5-year-old’s imagination. Of the three, this commercial is the truest to the Wonka ethos. It suggests that the smartphone, which is supposed to connect us to any person or piece of information at any time, enlarges the world for adults, just as daydreams do for children. It also promises adults an escape from the daily grind, a chance to experience again the sense of wonder we knew as children.

Of course, even the loveliest commercials are intended to make money by selling us things we probably don’t need. Wonka was a salesman, too: He may have had the creativity of an inventor, but he also had the business-savvy of an entrepreneur, and his whimsical sweets made him a very rich man. Still, the people who use the Wonka legacy to market their products differ from the great man himself. For Willy Wonka, the ideas and inventions were the real thrill. The money was just the icing on the fizzy lifting drink.