I was reading Metafilter this morning and came across this post about Playboy’s archive (a bunch of issues from the last however many years that you can browse in full). Anyway, something the poster wrote really struck me: “but hey, the advertisements alone are incredible.” Looking back on old ads is a pretty amazing thing as they almost perfectly capture the style, culture and consciousness of whatever time period they were made.
For a company as old as GE, I’m sure the ads are a goldmine (we saw a bunch at the Schenchdaty Museum). Take this one:
The caption explains, “Edison launched major campaigns to attract ‘admirers’ to his lamps and even today the bulb is often associated with the contemplation of new ideas.” How crazy is it to think that not only did the company at one point need to convince people that light bulbs were a good idea (another old sign in the museum explained, “The use of electricty for lighting is in no way harmful to health, nor does it affect the soundness of sleep.”), but they also actively courted the association between the lightbulb and ideas.
Or take this ad, for GE refrigerators:
The first paragraph explains, “Really, you can’t blame her. Who wouldn’t drag her friends out into the kitchen to show off her new General Electric? There it stands, gleaming white, strong as a safe, incredibly quiet … the envy of all who see it.” It’s amazing to me, as someone that has never lived without a fridge, that at one point you had to sell people on the idea, not the brand.
All of this is a kind of long-winded way of getting at an idea: A giant database of GE ads for us all to peruse. With a good interface and some nice search engine, it would probably make for a great little history lesson.
It’s funny, my roommate has a stack of Life magazines from the early sixties that his grandfather kept. It’s fascinating to see the way advertising has evolved. In modern parlance, us in the industry might even call the ad you show above an advertorial. I wonder if people have gotten lazier or are advertisers just more in tune with what consumers will read. These days, it seems the less words the better in the opinion of many of my clients.
Yeah, I was thinking about that too … Clearly they weren’t afraid of copy. I wonder why the ad world went away from this approach. (In some ways, it seems like we’re moving back with all the advertorials.)
Thanks for the comment.