My personal favourite will probably always be the official Bayer ad for Heroin, however the below ads for Camels and 7-Up have to come a close second:
It’s always remarkable to reflect on advertising before the days of tobacco or HFSS rulings, but it’s still amazing to see quite what claims brands were able to make of their products - and what it was felt would persuade consumers to buy said products.
The Camels ad in particular reminds me of the Fry & Laurie ‘Dr Tobacco’ sketch whereby an incredulous patient is stunned to be prescribed cigarettes by his doctor - yet the truth really was stranger than fiction!
Which does of course beg the question - which of today’s ads are we going to look back at with utter astonishment, stunned at the crazy claims we used to sell products?
[ More weird and wonderful old ads at Oddee ]
Save to del.icio.us | Digg this
One thing I sincerely hope people are going to look back on in amazement is the faux-scientific claims of the beauty industry - firstly, that their ranks of top scientists have found that [something common] causes aging of the skin and secondly that they have developed [clearly fabricated name of compound] that happens to counteract precisely these effects.
Like the ads of the 1920s - 1950s tend to rest on the (frequently astonishing) claim that “this product is good, just ask a scientist or doctor”, I think that we’ll notice, looking back, that lots of adverts now rest on claims that the product (or service) is good for the environment. This could be explicitly stated - as when a company such as Shell leads an ad with a picture of one of their engineers holding a globe - or implicit, as Waitrose’s adverts show pictures of happy farmers patting cows on the flanks.
Tom also suggested twee mobile phone adverts would be something that would amuse in the future, and I’d certainly hope that, in the future, mobile phone advertising would dial down the talking to people is mutual understanding, therefore mutual respect, therefore world peace message. Not that “it’s an irradiating irritant that lets you have an argument with your boyfriend while you are on the train station and he is in the pub” is a good line to go with, but I think the other will have run its course quite soon.
[…] They don’t make ads like they used to - but what if they did? […]