Historical Advertisements

The first one that caught my eye was the Marlboro Ad. "Come to Marlboro Country", I think the first obvious subliminal thing here is the man being so high up on the mountain. It directly relates to getting that high from smoking a cigarette, and feeling on top of the world. Of course it is a cowboy in the ad smoking a cigarette with his horse, possibly to instill the strong man figure that Marlboro always tried to portray.

There were several ads that took the humor route to draw people in. MasterCard uses their infamous list of normal purchases, then throws in one weird item that a boxer would never buy. There tag line priceless is well known for commercials, but the humor behind it is this strong, sexy, mean looking boxer buying boxing gloves, punching bag, then the weird one the pink pashminas??? Also the ad about the game Risk was very humorous shaping the globe like a human butt. The game is a strategic war game about defeating the other side, so the obvious humor catches ones eye easily. Another was using the Rubbermaid ad in a burnt garage, however the wedding dress survived the fire, good way to get the readers attention, but kind of humorous how she looks burnt with her hair sticking strait up.

A lot of the newer ads for alcoholic beverages (Bacardi Limon, and Captain Morgan) involved beautiful woman and they are outnumbering the man in the shot, insinuating if you drink their beverage the woman will flock to you. In the Bacardi Limon the hand is actually looking in the bottle and the woman is in the bottle, that is obviously there for that reason. In the older alcoholic beverage ads they show men sitting around drinking together all proper like and happy. The Hennessy ad shows these men sitting around a piano dressed in tuxedo's like it is a after dinner cognac.

On Ad Access I liked the ad for NBC where the whole family is watching the TV but it isn't even out of the cardboard box. Obviously it is around the time when TV's were new to the home. Also NBC is trying to get the point across that there is such good entertainment on their station, people won't even want to finish unpacking the box to start watching. That was a good ad also it is speaking to the fact that color TV is new, and the ad is in color.