.
W. A. Taylor & Company advertisement for Martini & Rossi Vermouth: Life, 12 December 1938 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
Bernheim Distilling Company advertisement for I. W. Harper Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey: Life, 16 December 1940 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company advertisement for Schlitz Beer: Life, 27 December 1948 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company advertisement for Schlitz Beer: Life, 25 December 1950 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
Stitzel-Weiler Distillery advertisement for Old Fitzgerald Whiskey: Life, 14 November 1955 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
General Wine & Spirits Company advertisement for Chivas Regal Blended Scotch Whiskey: Time, 7 December 1962 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
Haig & Haig advertisement for Haig & Haig Pinch Scotch: Time, 7 December 1962 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
Early Times Distillery Company advertisement for Early Times Bourbon Whiskey: Time, 6 December 1963 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
Heublein Inc. advertisement for Smirnoff Vodka: Life, 22 December 1967 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
Heublein Inc. advertisement for Heublein Adventurous Cocktails: Saturday Evening Post, 28 December 1968 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
Independent research finds it notable that American liquor ads undergo a sea change in the early 1950s, from which point the subliminal signaling becomes more complicated. Class markers enter the picture, then sublimated sexual signals. In this abbreviated survey the change occurs with image #5, those disembodied phantom hands preparing the sixty year lost weekend at the end of which humans dwelling in this damaged land can't wake up from the nightmare which is their ersatz secular history, i.e. the only kind of history they will ever have.
ReplyDeleteLinking mass marketing to unconscious desires wasn't built in a day. In a brilliant BBS documentary called The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis traces the story of modern advertising back to Sigmund Freud and several of his relatives and acolytes.
ReplyDeleteThe first figure in Curtis's version of the history is Freud's nephew Edward Bernays. "An honest boy when I knew him," uncle Sigmund later said of Bernays. "I know not how far he has become americanized."
Then there is Ernst Dichter.
The Economist: Ernst Dichter, Freud, motivational research and "retail therapy".
Once prosperity overcame America in the 1950s, nobody needed all that product, but the system depended on somebody buying it anyway, so...
Freud, for his part, writing to the British psychiatrist Ernest Jones in the 1930s, opined that "America is a gigantic mistake".
Freud was no adman of course, but his emigré disciples in the American advertising industry took his basic idea about the role of the irrational in human behaviour, made it feel at home in a suburban consumer focus group, and the rest is that long lost weekend mentioned above.
An interesting condensed history of the mind control strategies demonstrated in this branch of the ad industry can be seen in this collection of alcohol adverts, 1840-2000.
♪♫ What made Milwaukee famous, made a loser out of me ..♫♪♪
ReplyDeleteMy father was an alcoholic Nothing glamorous or classy about it
Now much of the scotch in Scotland has been upgraded (and up-priced) for a luxury market
Something of a reality check right now so far as disposable income goes for many here. Better get used to it. I'd like to think of it as an opportunity to rethink spending habits. Ho ho ho!
Martini & Rossi
ReplyDeleteElixir of the ancients
listen to their whisperings
through their careful wrappings--
is it Martini & Rossi?
on the rocks?
so dry so thirsty.
Colin,
ReplyDeleteDitto here on all points save the original locus of the loss.
(Christmas of course was always THE worst time.)
I'm particularly unnerved by the Lebensborn in the Smirnoff advert.
ReplyDelete"The Century of the Self" is a must see.
They all look drugged, there on that fake snow. "For sure those pure blondes came out of a bottle, and it wasn't a Smirnoff bottle."
ReplyDelete(We felt bad for the stuffed albino reindeer.)