The Ads of the 50s and 60s

This is my second Media Arts blog post, and it is about the ads of the 50s and 60s. In the past, I have seen some of the ads from this era, and I thought they were stretching the truth and that no one today would give in today, let alone back then. However, the 4 ads posted on Mrs. Arturi’s blog are different than the others, and I feel that they would not be accepted at all by today’s standards.

The first add states that you can eat, eat, and eat, but still stay thin. How? By eating tapeworms! Obviously, this is an ad for a dieting plan that doesn’t sound like it would work, and if it did, you wouldn’t want to eat, eat, and eat because the food would be so disgusting. The second ad states that if you blow smoke from a certain cigarette into a woman’s face, she will, “follow you anywhere.” First off, this ad is endorsing cigarettes, which you don’t see much of today, and second of all, why would you allow someone to blow smoke in your face and then follow them afterwards? If someone blew smoke in my face, the LAST thing I would do is follow them. The third ad shows a family, and states that they are happy because they eat lard. Why someone would get all excited after eating pig fat, I do not know. What I do know, though, is that after eating all this lard, this family should be anything but happy!

The final ad has to be the worst of them all! It shows a doctor smoking a cigarette, and it says that more doctors smoke Camel cigarettes than any others. Why in the world would someone use a DOCTOR to indorse cigarettes when they are bad for you? Back when this ad was published, however, people would not have known that cigarettes were bad for you, but the company could’ve picked any other job, and they picked doctors. This ad certainly takes the cake!

The only reason these ads ran in the 50’s and 60’s was because they were what America accepted at the time. Obviously, these ads would not be accepted in the modern world, as today’s ads have more balanced gender roles and usually have statistics that actually make sense (doctors and cigarettes don’t go together). Overall, I find that the ads of today are much more convincing, but there is no forgetting that they were built of the ads of the 50s and 60s.