About this product: Forget Madison Avenue! Learn the unvarnished truth about what works, what doesn't and why from the most fascinating storyteller since Paul Harvey.
About this product: Second in a series of books featuring advertising by era, All-American Ads of the 50s offers page after page of products that made up the happy-days decade. The start of the cold war spurred a buying frenzy and a craze for new technology that required ad campaigns to match. The nuclear age left its mark all over the advertisements, with a spotlight on planes, rockets, and even mushroom clouds. Shiny, big, beautiful cars abound, styled to keep up with the space age. Editor Jim Heimann, in his essay "From Poodles to Presley, Americans Enter the Atomic Age," explains: "Car designers came up with exaggerated tail fins for automobiles to express this new accelerated speed." Modernist home interiors look slick and shiny with their molded plastic furniture and linoleum floors. While clothing and furniture styles look strangely contemporary--a testament to our current obsession with vintage--some things have definitely changed. A baby sells Marlboro cigarettes! Also included are chapters on movies, food, and travel. --J.P. Cohen
About this product: In this second edition of the irreverent, celebrated Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, master copywriter Luke Sullivan looks at the history of advertising, from the good to the bad to the ugly. Updated to include two extended final chapters with in-depth prescriptions for building a career in advertising, this edition also features a real-world look at the day-to-day operations of today's ad agencies. Among the most disparaged campaigns in advertising history, the Mr. Whipple ads for Charmin toilet paper were also wildly successful. Sullivan explores the Whipple phenomenon, examining why bad ads sometimes work, why great ads sometimes fail, and how advertisers can learn to balance creative work with the mandate to sell products.
Both eclipsed and influenced by television, American print ads of the 1970s departed from the bold, graphic forms and subtle messages that were typical of their sixties counterparts. More literal, more in-your-face, 70s ads sought to capture the attention of a public accustomed to blaring, to-the-point TV commercials (even VW ads, known for their witty, ironic statements and minimalist designs, lost some of their punch in the 1970s). All was not lost, though; as ads are a sign of the times, racial and ecological awareness crept into everything from cigarette to car advertisements, reminding Americans that everyday products were hip to the modern age. In an attempt to discover how best to communicate with a mass audience, marketing specialists studied focus groups with furious determination, thus producing such dumbed-down gems as "sisters are different from brothers," the slogan used for an African-American hair product. By the end of the decade, however, print ads had begun to recoup, gaining in originality and creativity as they focused on target audiences through carefully chosen placement in smaller publications. A fascinating study of mass culture dissemination in a post-hippie, television-obsessed nation, this weighty volume delivers an exhaustive and nostalgic overview of 70s advertising.
About this product: James B. Twitchell's celebration of the greatest 20 hits of the U.S. advertising industry shows how a thoughtful consideration of ads can add up to a fascinating social history. From Lydia Pinkham's patent medicines (said to cure all serious "Female Complaints") to Nike shoes worn by Michael Jordan, Twitchell gives us a quickie history of the ads that hit home and transformed our culture--the ones that "really had the beef," as he puts it. Some of the feats are amazing. The dazzling "Diamonds are forever" campaign managed to take not particularly rare rocks and transform them into sacred amulets practically everyone buys and never sells (which would depress their value). The ads brilliantly used honeymoon scenes by famous artists and swoony copy to woo women, while devoting a corner of each ad to fact-packed boxes reassuring men that diamonds were sound investments priced according to scientific principles. The jujitsu-psychology techniques of the VW Bug and Avis "We Try Harder" get their due, as does the "Does She... or Doesn't She?" ad that convinced women they could color their graying hair with Clairol's new one-step technology. The racy innuendo appealed to people fearing loss of appeal; the presence of young daughters in the pictures neutralized the floozy image dyeing used to have, and the line "Only her hairdresser knows for sure" soothed the salons that were about to lose their business once women figured out they could use Clairol at home.
There are all kinds of cool stories in this breezy book: how Anacin's $8,200 TV spot depicting a hammer in the headache sufferer's head earned $36 million; how Coke remade Santa literally in its own artist's image; how LBJ beat Goldwater partly because of a single 30-second ad featuring a girl resembling the murder victim in Frankenstein plucking and counting daisy petals while an announcer counts down to a nuclear blast that reminded voters of Goldwater's speeches about nuking Vietnam and made them forget the war was LBJ's fault in the first place. --Tim Appelo
About this product: People love this straight-talking ad-man from Texas and his powerful stories that shed light on advertising, marketing and success.
About this product: Taschen's legendary decade-by-decade chronicle of American advertising hits a high point in the book on the 1920s. Its hundreds of coruscatingly colorful Jazz Age advertisements, superbly reproduced on practically bulletproof paper, add up to an irresistible question: why stay this side of paradise when the new consumer culture can send you to heaven right now? Just look up: apple-cheeked cherubs bear steaming flapjacks to a beaming sleeper; fluffy, angel-like Michelin tire men ply the skies; the Certainteed building-supplies giant (a sort of Australopithecus Jolly Green Giant) throws his head back against billowing cumulonimbus clouds. Cecil B. de Mille’s poster for his 1933 tsunami-disaster film The Deluge can't match the grandiosity of some of these ads for the humblest household products.
After a short but sweet introductory essay by New York Times designer Steven Heller, editor Jim Heimann organizes the ads by subject: consumer products, fashion and beauty, entertainment, travel, etc. It's gripping to watch sex and status try to outdo each other in selling 1920s cars: the snooty Pierce Arrow associates itself with wealthy Century Club types, while the Ford Fordor stresses the populist $660 price and the flapper struggling to keep the wind from whipping her perilously brief hem over her head. High art rears its lovely head in ads for the Marmon Big 8 racer, powered by a 125-horsepower engine and a lightninglike look derived from Futurist art. Most ads range in a safer esthetic region bounded by retro-Currier & Ives, zesty art deco, and the funny papers. Fear is a great motivator: hunky Marvin loses the girls to halitosis; classy dames subtly judge each other on the quality of the ScotTissue in the bathroom: "Women sense it immediately!" The ads featuring black people fascinatingly demonstrate that even the era's most talented artists couldn't draw blacks because they literally could not see them when they looked at them. This book is a must for any serious student of pop culture—or anybody out for a graphic good time. --Tim Appelo
About this product: A far cry from the aggressive ads we’ve become used to, American print advertisements from the first two decades of the 20th century were almost shockingly pleasant. Intricately designed and beautifully illustrated, often in the art nouveau style popular at the time, four-color, full-page magazine advertisements were welcome respites from the bland, text-filled pages among which they appeared. Sales pitches were earnest and friendly; beer, for example, was billed as "The Evening Glass of Cheer" and toothpaste was described as "Delicious Ribbon Dental Cream"—perhaps not the catchiest slogans, but they were on to something. The American consumerist boom of the 20th century was just beginning and advertising was getting its sea legs. From motorcars to hair tonics to steamship cruises to Coca-Cola ("After the theatre drink a glass… it relieves fatigue"), America was peddling its wares in style and setting an example of how to advertise in the modern age. This exhaustive compendium of ads from the period—many of which haven’t been seen for over eight decades—is a fascinating reminder of surprisingly simpler times and a rediscovery of a forgotten age in advertising history.
The seventh book in the fascinating Taschen 'All-American Ads' series and as editor Jim Heimann says in his short introduction, print creativity wasn't exactly sparkling in the Eighties. Television took most of the ad budget leaving print to soak up what was left with ads that reinforced what had been seen on the small screen. Still, some ads did capture the consumer's imagination, do you remember 'The united colors of Benetton', 'Just do it' for Nike, Maxell cassettes, Swatch and Absolut vodka campaigns?
The 608 pages in this latest book follow the same style as the others, divided into nine chapters which do actually vary in each book according to which decade you are looking at, here Electronics gets a fifty-eight page section all to itself and not an mp3 or DVD player in sight (or a reel-to-reel tape-deck). The ads are either whole page or four to a page and they have all been cleaned up colorwise and corrected to avoid screen clash with the originals.
I enjoyed the section on Entertainment, loads of memory-jogging movie ads showing how Hollywood moved ever closer to the teen and twenties market. Alcohol and Tobacco contains almost the last ads for cigarettes, remember the Camel 'Smooth Character'? As with 'All-American Ads 70s' I thought the best designed stuff was in the Business and Industry chapter, agency designers and typographers could ignore the restraints that often applied to consumer ads.
I now have the seven books in the series (the set will be complete with 'All-American Ads of 1900-1919) and they all reveal a fascinating look at American life and consumer culture over the previous decades.
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