A Scottish child and a Native-American child pour hair tonic on the head of an elderly Anglo man and massage it in, while a child soldier out of some European comic opera stands by with sword upraised in tribute.
The only sensible part of this weird iconography is the Scottish kid. Once upon a time, right up to, oh, the 1960s, "anything Scottish = cheap and economical" was standard advertising shorthand.
We're aligning our product with a subculture that is the butt (no pun intended) of thousands of late-night comedy-show jokes, and whose practitioners are seen as eccentric perverts.
That said, I bet the ad agency had a lot of fun at the photo shoot.
Yeah, she was blind and socialist. But the important question is -- can her name help sell sunglasses? A Chinese eyewear company thinks the answer is yes. Which proves, I guess, that the Chinese have become just as adept as us Americans at recycling cultural heroes into hawkers of overpriced crap. (Thanks to Bob Pagani for the link!) Check out the Helen Keller Sunglasses ad below:
We all know that ad campaigns have often created the disease or deficiency they wish to sell remedies for. "Halitosis" and "BO" were Madison Avenue inventions.
But perhaps no campaign dared quite as much as that for Cremo cigars, with its charge that all its competitors spit on their product.
During the 1920s, the cigar industry began to suffer from image problems. The rise of organized crime during Prohibition, and the image of the stogie-chomping gangster--developed in part by Hollywood, and personified by such actors as Edward G. Robinson--gave the cigar an aura of disrespect among the public. Later that decade, the cigar industry faced a second crisis, when American Tobacco began promoting new, machine-rolled cigars. Its advertising asked: "Why run the risk of cigars made by dirty yellowed fingers and tipped in spit?" The image proved disastrous for the cigar industry as a whole. Cigar makers rushed to convert their manufacturing from hand-rolled to machine-rolled products, but cigar sales plunged through the 1930s. During this same time period, the cigar industry was hit hard by the rise in cigarette use across the United States. Cigar consumption never recovered to its early 1920s peak.
It makes no difference whether you want your house painted or not; whether you want to use Sherwin-Williams or another brand; whether you plan to do it yourself or employ a different company. None of this counts in the face of O. J. Wangen's plan for world domination. "Let us have our way... We will have it, all or part of it in the end."
Category: Business, Advertising, Products, Technology, 1970's, Alcohol