Marketing Wizards of a bygone era...

[Belligerent Savant]

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A bit less subtle in the good 'ol days, ay?

http://www.waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/creep ... s.html?m=1

More Infants Drinking Soda



The Soda Pop Board of America was just like, "So let's write down the things we want to be true and then make that the ad."




Pure pleasure! Yes, you've really achieved something here by giving a fizzy, sugary drink to someone who has been alive for 50 days and getting a positive reaction.




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On the sad little girl's chest, it says, "Papa says it won't hurt us!" So papa's reasoning is, "I got a gun that has a child lock on it—now my 2-year-old daughter can finally sleep with a gun."
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"You see so many good things in Du Pont Cellophane." Like, apparently, babies being murdered via suffocation.

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No comment.
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Impossibly Annoying-Looking Redheaded Boys Excited To Put Food In
Their Shit-Eating Mouths



I can barely look at this picture it annoys me so much.



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This girl just fully goes for it. Full-force bigotry. Two other questions—why is the boy wearing a dress, and why is the girl wearing shoes in the ocean?



Another gem from Pears' Soap. Their claim is that black people are actually just really dirty white people . See? This nice white girl gives him the first bath of his life, and—voila! He's white! The dude looks as shocked about it as I am.



And of course, if washing doesn't work, well, you can always use paint!

Some kind of time you grew up in, 55-110 year olds.
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Roly-Poly Rosey-Cheeked Rapey-Looking Four-Year-Old Boys
Smugly Eating Something Sloppily

I really don't know what else to say about this prominent genre of ad in the 40s.

[Joao]

Loved this one that justdrew posted in the Government Shutdown thread and I think it's well-suited to a repost here. It's utterly indistinguishable from contemporaneous Iron Curtain propatainment, except for the fact that Soviet production values generally lagged the West's by about 5 or 10 years:

Simpler times.

The ability to recognize and properly process marketing (AKA propaganda, PR) should be taught as a kind of modern-day literacy. It's truly an infernal science.

[Luther Blissett]

The first advertising agency merely brokered space in newspapers and publications for those mid-19th century ads, written in plain, classified style for goods, services, and wants. There was barely any gussied-up language or artwork for about a decade or so, before the game was really changed by quacks selling tinctures and lies. They were the first to really glom onto the power that they foresaw in the advertising agencies, and facilitated society's push into modern advertising.

Philadelphia was the home to the first and second modern ad agencies in the world, Volney Palmer and N.W. Ayer & Sons. Ayer bought Volney Palmer so laid claim to being the oldest (and longest-lasting) bar none. But, it was the thieving quacks whose greed preceded the modern model (of copywriter teams and art teams working together under a creative director) that we all know from Mad Men. That agency structure didn't appear until the late nineteenth century. Before that, Philadelphia was also the print capital of the trans-Atlantic trade route, and home to many innovations in lithography. In the earlier days, merchants would simply commission an etching of their product and hand it off to the advertiser.

Ayer revolutionized all that, the Curtis Publishing-influenced illustrators made it pretty, and Madison Avenue perfected it into a machine of destruction. Ayer killed children by saying "A diamond is forever."

The funny thing is that in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, I believe that humanity actually needed to go through this transformation of being able to trade goods and services with new efficiency. The business world was changing from the old structure (apprentice, journeyman, merchant, lender) to the new (management class invested in the corporation overseeing a sea of minions), and simultaneously, the modernist era was only then beginning to destroy the old notions of traditional power structures (church, nation, monarchy, father), guide self-determination outside of those hegemonies, and to protect hitherto vulnerable private enterprises. It is the fault of capitalist scourge that humanity "overdid it" when it came to advertising.

[Carol Newquist]

OH MY GOD!! I laughed so hard I pissed myself. Good thing I was wearing these:

[norton ash]

Thank you, Belligerent Savant. It's quite Lovecraftian in all its wrongness.

I'm building a sanctuary for gingers, btw. Enlisted and exploited by the dark forces... the poor little orange ones.