So, What's the Big Idea?
Advertising in the Sixties, by Steven Heller. Excerpt from the book 'All-American Ads of the 60s, edited by Jim Heimann
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If the advertisements in this mammoth volume were the sole artifacts a historian used to examine and analyze the turbulent Sixties, a picture of American culture would emerge that bears scant resemblance to social and political realities of the times. Where are the Blacks, Latinos, or Asians? Viewed from this vantage point, the Sixties had no civil rights protest, Vietnam War, or sex, drugs, and rock and roll-at least not in any meaningful way. The advertisements here, exhumed from the crypts of Madison Avenue as mummified in the mass magazines of the day, were sanitized, homogenized, and cauterized, which is not to say that they did not have style, taste, or humor, or that they do not represent the zeitgeist in a jaundiced way.
Advertising is, after all, artificial truth. Of course, certain claims are accurate - makeup hides blemishes, soda is sweet, bad breath smells, headaches hurt, and sunglasses shade the eyes. Definitely, by the Sixties, phony snake oil and patent medicine advertisements from the turn of the century were long since abolished. Yet advertising, especially at this time, was nonetheless designed to out-smart, out-do, and out-sell competition no matter what it was, through whatever means was tolerable within the parameters of so-called "truth in advertising" doctrines-which is a concept akin to allowing acceptable amounts of rat hair in food. Fabrications and exaggerations existed but no one cared because the images, words, and concepts toed the line between the possible and the preposterous. What's more, by the early Sixties post-war Americans were happily conditioned to believe anything that mass media put forth, and advertising was embraced without question or hesitation. Consequently, many magazine ads and TV commercials were viewed more as entertainment - or pastimes - than as crass sales pitches.
During the Sixties, advertising evolved from its primordial emphasis on lengthy, turgid texts to snappy, witty headline and picture ensembles through a method known as the "Big Idea". The term connotes both a radical shift from the past and a distinctly American genre of creative promotion. The pioneers of the so-called "Creative Revolution", out of which the Big Idea emerged, realized that to truly capture an audience's attention and impart lasting messages they had to continually amuse. So to keep the public on their feet Mad Ave had to call in some of its biggest creative guns.
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Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
If the advertisements in this mammoth volume were the sole artifacts a historian used to examine and analyze the turbulent Sixties, a picture of American culture would emerge that bears scant resemblance to social and political realities of the times. Where are the Blacks, Latinos, or Asians? Viewed from this vantage point, the Sixties had no civil rights protest, Vietnam War, or sex, drugs, and rock and roll-at least not in any meaningful way. The advertisements here, exhumed from the crypts of Madison Avenue as mummified in the mass magazines of the day, were sanitized, homogenized, and cauterized, which is not to say that they did not have style, taste, or humor, or that they do not represent the zeitgeist in a jaundiced way.
Advertising is, after all, artificial truth. Of course, certain claims are accurate - makeup hides blemishes, soda is sweet, bad breath smells, headaches hurt, and sunglasses shade the eyes. Definitely, by the Sixties, phony snake oil and patent medicine advertisements from the turn of the century were long since abolished. Yet advertising, especially at this time, was nonetheless designed to out-smart, out-do, and out-sell competition no matter what it was, through whatever means was tolerable within the parameters of so-called "truth in advertising" doctrines-which is a concept akin to allowing acceptable amounts of rat hair in food. Fabrications and exaggerations existed but no one cared because the images, words, and concepts toed the line between the possible and the preposterous. What's more, by the early Sixties post-war Americans were happily conditioned to believe anything that mass media put forth, and advertising was embraced without question or hesitation. Consequently, many magazine ads and TV commercials were viewed more as entertainment - or pastimes - than as crass sales pitches.
During the Sixties, advertising evolved from its primordial emphasis on lengthy, turgid texts to snappy, witty headline and picture ensembles through a method known as the "Big Idea". The term connotes both a radical shift from the past and a distinctly American genre of creative promotion. The pioneers of the so-called "Creative Revolution", out of which the Big Idea emerged, realized that to truly capture an audience's attention and impart lasting messages they had to continually amuse. So to keep the public on their feet Mad Ave had to call in some of its biggest creative guns.
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