Vintage Advertisements - Beautiful Objects on Offer

I've been mining old magazines to find some relly cool old style advertisements. I found these beauties in a National Geographic from the turn of the last century. Beautiful gadgets and cars.

I'm thinking of making trading cards of these images. What do you think?

Happy Housewives Love Their Appliances?

I've been on record deploring the ads of the 1940s and 50s that glorify housewives love for appliances. There are many forms that this love takes. The straight forward "Using this stove makes me happy", the less obvious, "I love this hot water heater so much, I need to draw a heart on it". 

I can just imagine a room full of advertising executives trying to come up with a tag line that expresses how much affection women have for big metal boxes.

Housewife-ly Bliss - Mad Men Style Living

As a general rule, I think living in the 1960s would have been quite hard. First, as this ad illustrates, you'd need to have a relationship with your appliances.

This is one of a series of ads I've uncovered recently in my exploration of the ad industry. I don't think much has changed in how goods get sold. You wouldn't want to take a time machine into the worlds created by advertising executives. Or, at least, many people would recognize this as fantasy.

Need this ad Click Here.

The Positively Good

I've been reading David Ogilvy's excellent book on the advertising industry.  He was big in the sixties and seventies.And I'm finding that his views on promoting products still stand true today.  Here's a really relevant quote that I'm reflecting on.

"If you and your competitors all make excellent products don't try to imply your product is better. Just say what is good about your product - and do a clearer, more honest, more informative job of saying it."

"Sales will swing to the marketer who does the best job of creating confidence that his product is positively good."