I grew up in the 70’s and early 80’s and commercials back then virtually always said “Compared to the leading brand” or something similar when they named the virtues of their products. You would almost never hear them refer to their competitors by name. Sometime in the mid to late 80’s, that seemed to change rather abruptly and and, all of the sudden, we starting hearing things like “gets out 20% more stains than Tide”.
Advertisers still refer to the “leading brand” sometimes now of course but it was like someone finally gave them other options at one point.
Whether to explicitly name a competitor has been a running argument in advertising for many decades, and continues today.
There is a convincing argument that has been made that the mere mention of a competitor’s product is injurious because a) it implies that the product is a bigger (more popular, better known, better) brand than yours is, b) it gets confusing for the consumer to remember who’s attacking what on what grounds, c) you have to be able to back your claim with reams of numbers, and d) all advertising is good advertising. Putting the competition’s name in your ad is like running free advertising for them, IOW. Some firms, some companies, some industries think it works, and some don’t. I don’t trust any studies of advertising, because if they worked so would ads, and they are still at the classic “we know that 50% of our advertising is wasted, now if we only knew which half” stage.
I don’t think there was ever a federal prohibition on this, but I think networks at one time prohibited the practice. After all, the competitors advertised too and why piss them off?
The 60s, as always, changed everything. Network practices certainly loosened up, but it took a change in the culture as baby boomers came into advertising and were less polite than earlier practitioners were.
It’s been quite a while since I did a lot of reading in advertising history, so I may be missing a formal change here and there. I just read e-logic’s link and it seems to back me up, though.
Sometimes you don’t even have to mention your competitor to help them.
An example is the Heinz “Great American Soup” commercials. They were extravagent, Busby-Berkley type productions, opulent and very expensive. Said at the time to be among the most expensive commercials made. Often, the production cost of a 1-minute commercial was higher than the whole half-hour episode of the show it was iinterrupting.
And the net result on the viewer:
"Soup is good food – I ought to serve soup to my family more often’. So the next time that housewife went to the grocery store, she bought more soup. But she bought Campbells, like she always had.
So the result of these commercials by Heinz was that Campbells sold more soup. Had the commercials actually mentioned “Campbells”, probably would been even more.
We did exactly this mistake about ten years ago, at a radio station I was working with. We branded our 9-5 segment as “Perfect music while you work”. We felt really cocky about it, thought we had a good thing going.
Later studies showed that we’d poured all our advertising budget into telling people that listening to radio @ work was a good thing, but not saying why they should listen to us. It ended up hurting us really bad as 2/3 of our audience ´vanished over six months to a new station in the market.
[opinion] I really hate thus “Try us, we’re really better, really, really” type of ads. I prefer Coke over Pepsi and BK over McD, but when I see a whiney BK commercial, I get an urge to spend my money at McD.[/]
During the 1970s, Schlitz (“the beer that made Milwaukee famous”) had fallen on hard times. In 1980, fighting to regain its market share, Schlitz ran TV commercials with live head-to-head taste tests against Miller, Michelob and Budweiser.
Doing them live may have been a mistake, as the best Schlitz could manage was a tie against Budweiser in one of two tests.
That’s the first I remember, outside of political advertising.