After considering Alan Alda, Beverly Sills, Kermit the Frog, and Billy Martin as celebrity endorsers IBM chose Charlie Chaplin's The Little Tramp character—played by Billy Scudder—for a series of advertisements based on Chaplin's films. The very popular and award-winning $36-million marketing campaign made the star of Modern Times—a film that expresses Chaplin's opposition to big business, mechanization, and technological efficiency—the (as Creative Computing described him) "warm cuddly" mascot of one of the world's largest companies.
Chaplin and his character became so widely associated with IBM—Time stated that "The Tramp ... has given a human face"—that others used his bowler hat and cane to represent or satirize the company. Although the Chaplin estate sued those like Otrona who used the trademark without permission, PC Magazine's April 1983 issue had 12 advertisements that referred to the Little Tramp.
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