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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The gun is an apt metaphor because an advertising campaign is no different from a battlefield maneuver. The larger the artillery or the better the strategy or the greater the manpower, the more hearts and minds will be won over. Continual bombardment of slogans and images clearly reduced resistance and built recognition. If the product being advertised actually lived up to the claims, so much the better. But this was not even necessary if the battle was uncontested. Witness the advertisements for some of the Sixties' leading brands - Maidenform (R), Anacin (R), General Electric, and Clairol. While the products efficiently did their jobs, in each case their manufactured auras and fake mythologies gave them stature and sales appeal so that each commanded a strong market share, until eventually they were challenged by an even more formidable mythologizing force. Fortunes of existing products were often changed through smarter, if also more relentless, advertising campaigns, and new brands earned affluence through what in the Madison Avenue argot is known as spectacular "creative".
Witness the Sixties campaign for Volkswagen created by Doyle Dane Bernbach that took a little Nazi "people's" car designed in the late 1930s under Adolf Hitler's auspices and instantly made it the best selling economy car in big-car-loving America by claiming its perceived deficits were truly advantages. That was strategic ingenuity and brilliant advertising. Or take the ad for the portable Sony, a tiny TV made in Japan (another former wartime adversary), home of the cheap transistor radio, which, through witty copy and image, propelled the brand into direct competition with American-made giants.
During the Sixties, the Big Idea made advertising decidedly cleverer, funnier, and more enjoyable than ever before. New standards were set by the wunderkinder of Madison Avenue, such as art directors George Lois, Gene Federico, Bill Taubin, Helmut Krone, Bob Gage, and others who captured the power inherent in good typography and strong imagery to add touches of class to ads that did not turn noses up at the masses but afforded them greater respect. Yet their respective gems were set alongside many cheaper stones. The Sixties was a transitory period in which the Creative Revolution fought the mediocre status quo. And mediocre does not imply unprofessional, either. A typical ad for Swift Premium breakfast sausage - which uses a photograph that imitates a Norman Rockwell painting replete with Betty Crocker (R) mom and two clean-cut varsity brothers good-naturedly fighting over the machine-processed delicacy - cost considerable money and energy to produce. Yet the creators apparently lacked the vision and intuition that an exemplary ad, even for such a quotidian product as pork sausage, could use wit to transcend cliché.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
The gun is an apt metaphor because an advertising campaign is no different from a battlefield maneuver. The larger the artillery or the better the strategy or the greater the manpower, the more hearts and minds will be won over. Continual bombardment of slogans and images clearly reduced resistance and built recognition. If the product being advertised actually lived up to the claims, so much the better. But this was not even necessary if the battle was uncontested. Witness the advertisements for some of the Sixties' leading brands - Maidenform (R), Anacin (R), General Electric, and Clairol. While the products efficiently did their jobs, in each case their manufactured auras and fake mythologies gave them stature and sales appeal so that each commanded a strong market share, until eventually they were challenged by an even more formidable mythologizing force. Fortunes of existing products were often changed through smarter, if also more relentless, advertising campaigns, and new brands earned affluence through what in the Madison Avenue argot is known as spectacular "creative".
Witness the Sixties campaign for Volkswagen created by Doyle Dane Bernbach that took a little Nazi "people's" car designed in the late 1930s under Adolf Hitler's auspices and instantly made it the best selling economy car in big-car-loving America by claiming its perceived deficits were truly advantages. That was strategic ingenuity and brilliant advertising. Or take the ad for the portable Sony, a tiny TV made in Japan (another former wartime adversary), home of the cheap transistor radio, which, through witty copy and image, propelled the brand into direct competition with American-made giants.
During the Sixties, the Big Idea made advertising decidedly cleverer, funnier, and more enjoyable than ever before. New standards were set by the wunderkinder of Madison Avenue, such as art directors George Lois, Gene Federico, Bill Taubin, Helmut Krone, Bob Gage, and others who captured the power inherent in good typography and strong imagery to add touches of class to ads that did not turn noses up at the masses but afforded them greater respect. Yet their respective gems were set alongside many cheaper stones. The Sixties was a transitory period in which the Creative Revolution fought the mediocre status quo. And mediocre does not imply unprofessional, either. A typical ad for Swift Premium breakfast sausage - which uses a photograph that imitates a Norman Rockwell painting replete with Betty Crocker (R) mom and two clean-cut varsity brothers good-naturedly fighting over the machine-processed delicacy - cost considerable money and energy to produce. Yet the creators apparently lacked the vision and intuition that an exemplary ad, even for such a quotidian product as pork sausage, could use wit to transcend cliché.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
All-American Ads of the 60s
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