I was reading a book of old advertisements from the 60s. One of them showed an attractive woman with a big smile and a bigger shiner around one eye. Probably some people here are more familiar with the ad then I am, Tarryton cigarettes with the slogan “I’d rather fight than switch”.
The ad seemed pretty shocking in light of modern sensibilities. Two questions:
Was the campaign particularly shocking at the time, or just a little controversial or attention seeking?
Are there similar old ads you have seen recently which made you wonder what the shill they were thinking?
As I recall, those cigarette advertisements usually featured men with a black eye. And I don’t recall it being particularly taken as offensive.
How ironic, in the past few days I’ve gotten a lot of pop-up clickbaits for advertising that would not fly today. Mostly sexist.
For item 2 - there was an advertisement for some car, albeit a few years ago, that emphasized its heated seats. They did this by having the mom pick up her high-school daughter from school. Said daughter must had a hard day at gym class,She nestled into the heated passenger seat with a “cat that swallowed the canary” smile. Then moved around - I swear that she was doing a lap-dance on the seat. I only saw the ad once or twice - so perhaps someone quickly pulled it.
Tareyton was undoubtedly playing off the “Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should” slogan, which also got idiots into a fury over the “slovenly grammar.”
And, it was a long-running campaign for them, as well; Wikipedia indicates that they used it from 1963 until 1981.
I imagine that a campaign featuring black eyes, and implied fighting, wouldn’t fly today, regardless of if it depicted men or women (though I agree that it would be even more problematic featuring women).
There was a Club cocktails ad campaign in 1980 that had some trouble over its slogan (as with Taretyon, both men and women were depicted). The third ad shows the replacement slogan.
At least one of those is an obvious fake (the Hardee’s one, which uses the chain’s modern logo and flat-out calls Hardee’s food “sloppy and poorly prepared”). Who knows how many of the others aren’t authentic, as well (although, yeah - I’m sure a bunch of them are!).
One company. responding to these complaints about grammar, ran an ad that said “what do you want, good grammar or good taste?”
The comedian Robert Klein a special parodied this ad and asked “why can’t we have both?”
Hey, for the time Tareyton was advanced, saying that women equally deserved the right to fight to get lung cancer. Much worse were the airline aids saying
I’m Cheryl, Fly Me.An article about this.
There was also a campaign featuring wives begging their hubbies to take them along on a trip.
That was a promotion by TWA. Supposedly it backfired because a lot of business travelers told the airline it was no one’s damn business who they traveled with.
There was the Folger’s Coffee commercial in which a man complains about the lousy coffee his wife used to make until she discovered Folger’s and now he loves her coffee. He ends by saying: “My wife – I think I’ll keep her!”
Old Lysol ads (circa 1950s or so?) subtly (or not-quite-so-subtly) pushed Lysol douches as a contraceptive, in the days when contraception was illegal. They euphemistically referred to the usage as “feminine hygiene” but their ads made the meaning clear.
Lysol is not a healthy thing to use for a douche, and the older formula used in those days was even worse. On top of which, this article says it isn’t even very effective.
Article in Smithsonian from 2013 about it, including images of several ads:
There is a Folger’s ad where the husband clearly implies his wife is essentially a failure because of her subpar coffee. This ad is a favorite of my feminist sister since it is fairly extreme by modern standards.
