'Perception vs. Reality.' A Look Back at Rolling Stone's Greatest Ad Campaign Ever

Joe Alexander picks his favorite ads of all time

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Fifty years after its founding, Rolling Stone magazine just put itself up for sale. But while it’s clearly the end of an era for the venerable music publication, it’s not its first identity crisis. Just look at what it went through in the mid-1980s.

At that time, the brand still had a large and engaged audience of readers, but ad buyers tended to dismiss them as dope-smoking hippies who weren’t a valuable target for ads. The publication disputed that, beginning in 1985, with a series of print ads from Fallon themed “Perception vs.

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