The Commercial with a Sensayuma
William Taubin, Howard Zieff: Doyle Dane Bernbach, Inc., Levy's, 1964
Being in advertising on television is hard. Darrin on Bewitched was in advertising. I recall a campaign of insects walking into a bank with this tagline, “Even the little people matter at Bank Such and Such.” At 8 I knew this was a bad ad campaign. Insects are creepy, and the subtext of the message is patronizing at best. On Mad Men, Don Draper won an award for a commercial with a tiny chuck wagon. I assume this is based on the Chuck Wagon commercial from 1970. Recently, Peggy described an ad with a ballet of beans. I assume this shift is talking about the changes in advertising from the 1950s through the 1960s.
When I’m teaching, I show a 1958 Edsel ad to explain a boring ad. It’s a photo of a car and the copy tells me it’s a car. On the other end of the spectrum is a campaign like the Levy’s Rye Bread campaign from 1964. I see the product, but the copy asks me to do some work. It relies on the viewer’s cultural knowledge. It demystifies a product that might be considered exotic in 1964. And the final takeaway is a sense of humor and success. “Oh, I get it, the policeman must be Irish.” If you ad the fact that most ads in 1964 had a whole bunch of white people and nobody else, these are even more striking. So, why now do I see current ads that show me a car and read, “This is a car.”
William Taubin, Howard Zieff: Doyle Dane Bernbach, Inc., Levy's, 1964
William Taubin, Howard Zieff: Doyle Dane Bernbach, Inc., Levy's, 1964
William Taubin, Howard Zieff: Doyle Dane Bernbach, Inc., Levy's, 1964
William Taubin, Howard Zieff: Doyle Dane Bernbach, Inc., Levy's, 1964
William Taubin, Howard Zieff: Doyle Dane Bernbach, Inc., Levy's, 1964
William Taubin, Howard Zieff: Doyle Dane Bernbach, Inc., Levy's, 1964
Ford Edsel print ad, 1957
Tags: 1964, Advertising, Bewitched, Chuck Wagon, Doyle Dane Bernbach, Howard Zieff, Mad Men, William Taubin
May 8th, 2012 at 5:35 pm
The Edsel ad sucks but, it was aimed at upwardly mobile white suburban families.
Just like the kind in front of the ranch house with the Edsel in front. It has its own kind of meta, for the time.
I live in a predominantly middle and upper middle class African American area of the U.S. So I get to see commercials and ads directed at that group. They are not all that different than the Edsel ad. I presume in Los Angeles, the same is true for now majority former minorities there? Dreams are dreams.
Like my father and mother, both from working class families, mothers were immigrants, both inner city kids of the depression, from a section of town where there were all races and nationalities, he and another brother were first to go to college on the GI bill after WWII, mom and dad had a boy and a girl, he was a businessman, they moved to the suburbs for the rest of their lives, etc. Although, he would never have bought an Edsel! That was for Republicans.