I have a DVD collection of ads from the '50s and '60s, and one is of an opera singer saying that smoking didn’t affect his voice.
That is a very disrespectful way to treat Salma Hayek!
That might be true, but only part of the larger context. The ad was targeted at the male business flyer, the market segment that brought in regular big bucks in an era when flying was expensive. The hidden meaning of the ad is that despite their obvious beauty, they were rejected because they weren’t “fun.” Fun meaning sexually available.
The 60s were a decade when the word stewardesses was becoming interchangeable with “mobile hookers.” Plays, and movies, and television, and novels all presented stews as out to have a good time and maybe quit their jobs to get married to the right man. The fake memoir Coffee, Tea, or Me? appeared at the same time as this ad. It was ghostwritten by a male PR guy to make dull stories sexy, and sold a million copies because they had sex every chapter with every guy (except those gay perverts who weren’t interested). It couldn’t ruin the job’s reputation but it sure solidified it for years.
Airplanes competed on the sexiness of their stews, also why hot pants and miniskirts and high heels were made part of their uniforms. This ad was superb at its one job: to tell male businessmen a story that they wanted to hear. Fly Eastern. You’ll Get Laid.
I thought of that title immediately upon your reference to “mobile hookers”.
I’d love to go back to the 60s and tell everyone, “You people are sick!”
Not an ad, but check out the serial killer on this postcard.
That guy is blythe! (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
Did any stewardesses in the '60s wear eyeglasses?
Pan Am had a rule banning eyeglasses and contact lenses.
And not be married, according to the video ad.
In the 1920s, Lucky Strike unveiled a new advertising campaign that was credited with increasing the brand’s cigarettes sales more than 300 percent in the first year. The slogan: “Reach for a lucky instead of a sweet.”
The ads, “designed to prey on female insecurities about weight and diet,” as the Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising put it, helped usher in a wave of tobacco marketing targeted to women.
You’ve come a long way, baby? And weren’t Marlboro reds initially targeted at women?
Yes, that was among the first of many of Edward Bernay’s infamies.
In the same way Listerine invented “halitosis” in the 1920s.
And was still doing the ads through the 1950s.
Same thing with Body Odor or B.O.
Smithsonian has an article on that too.
There wasn’t any part of a woman that advertisers couldn’t target to make them feel bad.