Cigarette advertising of the 1950s

This ad from the 1950s shows how carefully the nicotine drug trade hid the health risks from their clients. Camel cigarettes are made by R. J. Reynolds. They were introduced in 1913. Early ads boasted that the high quality of the tobacco prevented the offering of prizes or premiums, which was a common marketing ploy at the time. (See also cigarette cards.)

The obvious ploy of this ad is of course the link to doctors, who presumably wouldn’t smoke unhealthy cigarettes. The “T-Zone” blurb reinforces that message, as does the cosy middle-class ambience of a well-dressed mother (note the hat) with her well-dressed and intelligent daughter (her plaid skirt hints at a school uniform) facing an avuncular doctor dressed in medical whites and with reassuring grey at the temples. This is a doctor with experience. The books ranged behind the mother tell us he’s well-educated as well as kindly. A doctor to trust.

The ad copy is careful to say exactly what the surveys found, that the most-named brand was Camels. The copy doesn’t give us all the survey data, though. It doesn’t, for example, tell us how many doctors said they didn’t smoke. It doesn’t even tell us how many doctors named Camels, because a smallish number might suggest that many other brands were also popular, or that most doctors didn’t smoke at all. But it does tell us that 113,597 doctors were asked. A reassuringly large, and above all precise number.

The ad is a nice example of how to use images, words, and numbers to create an impression. That the impression may be misleading or false is not, of course, the advertiser’s fault. After all, there isn’t a single false statement anywhere. If the reader of the ad comes away believing that Camel cigarettes are healthy, well, you can’t control people’s thinking. Can you?

Advertising is applied poetry and fiction in the same sense that engineering is applied physics and chemistry. Reading a poem or story creates an imagined experience. So does reading an ad. Watching a story on film or TV creates an imagined experience, too. So does the commercial that interrupts the program. Narrative art controls the reader’s attention. So does an ad. Done skilfully, the ad creates an experience that will prompt the viewer to choose the product the next time they are shopping.

Advertising and Identity Politics

Is there a link between advertising and identity politics? This ad for a 1958 Edsel was posted on a Usenet newsgroup recently. I read it several times, and that question and some tangential thoughts developed.

The text is fascinating. The italicised arrived tell the reader that it’s not just about pulling up in front of the house. The car is a “status symbol”, a phrase much used in the 1950s to deprecate advertising. But some 60 years on, the text looks like it’s about more than mere status. It’s about achieving an identity, that of a successful businessman. It’s about being recognised as a person of importance. It’s about getting the respect the Edsel owner clearly deserves.

It begins by touting the car as a signal of status and identity: Other drivers spot that classic vertical grill a block away. Whomever the Edsel owner encounters will treat him as he deserves.

The neighbours will admit you deserve respect, too. And parked in front of your home, your Edsel always gets even more attention. It says you chose elegant styling....  And it all comes at the lowest cost of the medium-priced cars. Status at a bargain, which stamps the buyer as a canny money manager besides all his other virtues.

Advertising always tells a story. This ad tells the story of a successful white middle-class man, someone who has transformed himself from whatever he was before he started working towards this day. The day he drives up in a brand new red two-door hard-top Edsel in front of his a ranch style home, his good-looking (slim) wife, his two charming children. He’s wearing a suit, white shirt and tie, and a hat. He has arrived, he’s achieved the American Dream.

That dream doesn’t consist of house, car, clothes, or other goods. Those are mere signs and symbols of what actually matter: status, identity, privilege. By linking the Edsel to success, the ad assumes the values that prompt the striving for success. By taking those values for granted, the ad creates an assumption of shared values. That in turn reinforces those values. The central value is being somebody.

I think the link to identity politics is obvious. Identity politics is about being respected. More, it’s about being accepted as worthy of respect, as deserving acknowledgment, as having one’s proper place in society. It’s about having the same status as everyone else. It’s about being somebody instead of being ignored, deprecated, disrespected. It’s about deserving to achieve the American Dream.

Commercial art from 30 years ago: Graphis Annual 83/84

  

  Walter Herdeg, ed.  Graphis Annual 83/84 (1983) Just what the title says. A survey of applied art as used in advertising, illustrations in books and periodicals, logo and trademark design, packaging, and so forth. Graphis was one of the premier magazines for commercial artists. I used to buy it from a shop across from OCAD back then, to inspire my students. What’s interesting is how dated these examples are. Commercial art is slave to fashion and fad. Which prompts the inference that fashion itself is just another form of commercial art.
     In any case, fashion and commercial art feed on each other. Both are always a step or two behind the current styles in entertainment, which in turn is behind the latest developments in the arts. There was a nicely done weekly fashion news show on TV  a few decades ago. Most of the news covered fashion shows in New York or Paris or wherever. The background music was relentlessly blandified disco. This at a time when the prevailing music styles were acid rock, reggae, and hiphop. The intended ambience was of up-to-the-minute awareness of how the cool life was lived, but the actual effect was to make fashion seem hopelessly naive and, er, old-fashioned.
     Nevertheless, the Graphis annual is worth looking through. Not only as a record of bygone visual styles and assumptions about marketing, but because commercial art surrounds us in a way that fine art does not. Commercial art has become our  habitat; fine art is confined to cathedral-like museums that we enter with hushed voices and unarticulated expectations. Yet our taste has, I think, been shaped by the commercial art that has become the seen but unnoticed visual environment. ***

Ephemera

If you like 1920s and 30s poster and advertising art, you'll like this site of travel posters. I especially liked the Austrian ones, nostalgia is a weakness of mine. Poster and advertising art of the 1950s recalled that earlier period, so much of it will look familar to anyone growing up some 50 years ago.

I collect ephemera myself, mostly railway related. I resize the posters and print them out for gluing to my model (HO and O) buildings.