Those Dr. Pepper commercials were so over-the-top and silly it surprised me by how many people were upset by them.
I saw one from the late 60s or early 70s with a housewife poring herself a lite beer, saying you didn’t have to be one of those burly men from those commercial to enjoy the product. From off screen you hear her husband tell her to get her a beer, but this sweet housewife responds by snarling at him to “Get it yourself.”
The so-called “Battle of the Sexes” has been going on for a very long time, and (IMHO) it’s naive to think it’s ever going to end.
Those coffee commercials make me marvel at how much more bold the advertising industry was then. Bold in the sense of creating a need from scratch and convincing people (wives in this case) that “TRUST US, YOU’RE NOT HAPPY, AND YOU WON’T BE UNTIL YOU BUY THIS PRODUCT!!!”.
OTOH those commercials date to before I was born, so I don’t know firsthand what things were like. Plus, I’ve never drunk coffee. Was there an actual widespread dissatisfaction with coffee quality?
Hard to actually say. The product had declined in quality, but it’s not clear to me how many regular consumers really noticed this.
I do know that, starting in WWII, and accelerating through the 1950s to the 1970s, the quality of mass-market coffee brands in the U.S. declined. In that era, coffee was widely drunk, but over the course of those years, the big brands gradually, and quietly, used more and more robusta coffee beans in their products, and a lower proportion of arabica beans – at first, by necessity (due to reduced access to arabica beans during WWII), but later, done intentionally, for better profitability. Robusta beans are much more widely available (and less expensive) than arabica beans, but they produce a more bitter coffee product.
The net effect of that gradual change is that coffee grew increasingly bitter, but to longtime regular drinkers of coffee over those years, it may not have been immediately noticeable (the “frog in the pot of hot water” effect). But, by the '60s and '70s, someone who tried coffee for the first time often had a strong negative reaction to it: “This is bitter and nasty! Why would anyone choose to drink this?”
It wasn’t until the '80s and '90s, in large part due to the influence of brands like Peet’s and Starbucks, that coffee drinkers learned about arabica beans, and the better taste from them, and younger people started drinking coffee again.
Interesting. Mad Men had a story arc which focused on the fact that young people weren’t drinking coffee much in the early 1960s, but they didn’t go into the reasons.
Thank you for this!
I request that people re-read the title of the thread, because coffee in general isn’t the subject.
Just once I’d like to see a commercial where a female is doing the outdoor grilling, without hamhandedly pointing out that something unusual was going on.
Airline advertising was no slouch:
Which reminded me of the “I’m (Name), Fly Me” ads in the early '70s, for National Airlines, which featured the clear double entendre of the tagline, and soft-focus photos of attractive stewardesses, in an era where the airlines still marketed their good-looking young stewardesses as sex objects for male business travelers.
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“Undra”?
A real person, a Black stewardess named Undra Mays, who was hired by National in 1970, was one of the only Black stewardesses who were featured in the campaign, and who went on to a 50-year career as a flight attendant. (And, yes, I had to google her.)
She’s on the left in this picture:
And, while we’re on the airlines, in the '70s, Southwest was pretty blatant in presenting their stewardesses as potential sexual partners:
The beauty of TV commercial sexism is that it’s equal opportunity.
How many ads have you seen where the husband is a lazy worthless clueless slob and the wife is the responsible one keeping the whole household together?
Oh my. I am simultaneously cringing and literally laughing out loud at
Wow! 
There was a recent Aldi series featuring a Mom and her ravenous sons. One of them had her grilling steaks. These commercials were much hated, but because they all featured her sons noisily devouring food, not because of the Mom.
Southwest was founded at Love Field in Dallas; it’s still their headquarters, and they’ve used “love” as a subtle part of their corporate branding for years. They’ve used heart-shaped logos in some forms, and their stock symbol is “LUV”.
I can’t say whether that makes their advertising better or worse, but it’s not without some innocent precedent in their history.
I thought of this, but figured it was outside the bounds of this thread.
It does seem like all the examples shared so far are decades old. Is this a problem that has largely been solved already?
Great idea for another thread!
It’s a fair point, but the 1970s ads absolutely leaned into “love” in the context of “look at our sexy stewardesses, who will take good care of you.”
There was a commercial last year that wasn’t sexist per se but it had what I am pretty sure was a sex joke in it because they stopped running that version of the commercial. It was an ad for a company that helps with home repair (basically, a company that calls the service people for you, I don’t want to list the name because I don’t want to get ads for it). In the commercial, a husband and wife discover a water leak in their front yard. As the wife is staring at the water leak, the husband brings over her red rubber boots. Nothing special about these boots unless one happens to be freaky for rubber boots and based on the absolutely withering look the wife gave to the husband she was clearly saying “now is not the time!”
There’s also a commercial on right now for “the world’s quietest bed” and it shows a woman happily bouncing on the bed. It is subtle but not overly subtle about the kinds of activities one can get up to in a bed that would cause it to make noise.
I also see many, many commercials for little blue pills that feature women who have never encountered a hard dick before in their entire lives. These women are always super gorgeous and always very excited about what has been planned for Friday.
There’s also a commercial for a skin rash cream in which there is a young lady at a beach party type of setting. To help her deal with the rash on her arm, the commercial finds it necessary to show off the back pockets of her perfected fitted skort three times. I guess they were worried the audience doesn’t understand the concept of a skort, which is pair of shorts styled to look like a skirt from the front. So at least the commercial is unambiguous in that regard. What were we selling again?