All images Copyright © 2012 Time-Life, Inc.
They mention pretty girls being used to sell, which is nothing new, since they were used in every issue by Life advertisers. In many issues Life may have had as many advertising pin-ups as most girly magazines had cheesecake photos.Norman Mingo's Mennen ads stood out for their beauties. A few years later Mingo got another kind of fame by creating the painted portrait of Alfred E. Neuman for Mad, and contributed some of the greatest covers ever of that magazine.
Even GE got in on the act, selling light bulbs with a World War II-era cutey.
Starlets, in this case Virginia ("hold the") Mayo, were great for pushing products.
Esquire Socks used a sort of sexy double-entendre in their ads, which equated men's socks to a man's sex appeal. Personally, I've never seen any female get excited by guy's socks, but it worked in advertising.
DuPont got a whole lot of mileage selling their product, nylon, which has many uses, with pictures of nylon stockings on pretty girls. I personally feel there is much more sex appeal to a pair of nylons on shapely female legs than socks on sweaty masculine feet.
2 comments:
There's a span of around 50 years between the ads in the Life article and the magazine itself. As you pointed out, there's 62 years between the regular ads, i.e., the ones NOT featured in the article but that just normally ran in the magazine, and today. Yet, I have to say, 1950 seems to have somewhat more in common with 2012 than 1900, even though it was closer to the latter in time. Also, if you read the article itself, it's easy to forget it's 62years old. By that, I mean you could write an article (or a web site) in 2012 about early 20th century advertising, and not have to change a single word, the point-of-view remaining basically unchanged.
I apologize for my long-windedness, but this kind of thing fascinates me.
Kirk, I agree. The philosophy hasn't changed in over half a century, because I believe it was around that time that there were serious studies of consumers by advertisers. I remember the book, Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard was popular, which told the public what advertisers knew about them.
You're not long-winded; you have a good point and you made it well.
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