Before coming up with the slogan “Utz Are Better Than Nuts!” for the real-world Utz potato chip company on Mad Men, Don Draper and his crew had to study the competition, like this ad for Beech Nut or this one with Andy Griffith for General Foods.
Today we’re saturated with ads, more than the ad men that inspired Draper’s character could have ever imagined. They’re everywhere—on the dark interiors of tunnels as we speed along in light rail trains, in the games we let our kids play on smart phones—and they reveal a lot to us about ourselves.
Duke University’s John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History put together Adviews, a collection that brings together thousands of historic commercials from the 1950s to 1980s. Collected or created by the D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles advertising agency, the digital collection is available online and on iTunesU as a free archive. It’s also found at the Internet Archive, where ads can be downloaded as MP4 videos.
Watch Sterling Cooper’s (fictional) ad for Utz potato chips and then compare it to this goofy commercial for Daddy Crisp chips above.
We may have grown more savvy and suspicious of products that promise better health and efficiency, but if anything we’re more fascinated by advertising than ever. Since launching the archive in 2009, the commercials have logged 2.5 million downloads.
And for y’all who miss Andy Griffith, there’s a wealth of great stuff.
One of the scariest things about air travel is the seating assignment. You never know who you’ll end up next to. This classic 1968 advertising campaign from Braniff International Airways lets you imagine what it would be like to find yourself elbow-to-elbow with Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí.
In the commercial above, Warhol tries to explain the inherent beauty of Cambell’s Soup cans to heavyweight boxer Sonny Liston. Below, Dalí and major league baseball pitcher Whitey Ford compare notes on the knuckleball versus the screwball. The commercials were part of Braniff’s ambitious “End of the Plain Plane” rebranding campaign, which completely revamped the company’s stodgy image. Advertising executive Mary Wells Lawrence hired architect and textile designer Alexander Girard to redesign everything from airplane fuselages to ash trays. Italian fashion designer Emilio Pucci created flamboyant uniforms for the stewardesses, or “Braniff girls.” And in 1968 Lawrence brought in art director George Lois to oversee the “When You Got It, Flaunt It!” advertising campaign for print and television.
Lois later said he came up with the slogan before the celebrities were cast. In addition to the Warhol/Liston and Dalí/Ford pairings, the campaign included ads with another odd couple: pulp writer Mickey Spillane and poet Marianne Moore. In an interview with the New York Daily News earlier this year, Lois remembered that Warhol had trouble with his lines. “Andy had to say, ‘When you got it, flaunt it.’ But I ended up having to dub his voice. Later, after I sent him a copy of all the commercials, he told me that he said the line better than anybody.” The ads were a product of Lois’s gut-instinct approach to advertising. “Those ads,” he said in another interview, “would have totally bombed in ad tests. As things turned out, it tripled their business.”
In a world of accelerating obsolescence, of plastic products and digital information, a few old-school craftsman are still hanging on. But they’re getting harder and harder to find. In this pair of short films we meet a few craftsmen on both sides of the Atlantic who are stubbornly persisting while the world changes around them. Above is Ink & Paper by Ben Proudfoot, a student at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. It tells the story of the men who run the last surviving letterpress printing company in downtown Los Angeles, and the oldest paper company. Below is Le Mer de Pianos (The Sea of Pianos) by Tom Wrigglesworth and Mathieu Cuvelier, about the man who has spent 28 years (the last 15 as owner) running the oldest piano repair shop in Paris.
Earlier this month, we posted a pair of Wes Anderson-directed television commercials advertising the Hyundai Azera. While I understood that, at one time, a known auteur using his cinematic powers to pitch sensible sedans would have raised hackles, I didn’t realize that it could still spark a lively debate today. Seeing as Open Culture has already featured commercials by the likes of David Lynch, Frederico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Jean-Luc Godard — and I couldn’t resist linking to Errol Morris’ when discussing El Wingador — I assumed any issues surrounding this sort of business had already been settled. On Twitter, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, author of a hefty tome on Godard, seemed to corroborate this conclusion: “Bergman made commercials, so did Godard; the more distinctive the artist, the less the artist need worry about it.” “Also,” the Chicago Sun-Times’ Jim Emerson tweeted, “the, concept of “sellout” no longer exists.”
From all the ensuing back-and-forth between critics and cinephiles emerged Brody’s New Yorker blog post, “Wes Anderson: Classics and Commercials.” Pointing out that “so many great paintings were made for popes and kings and patrons, and great buildings sponsored by tycoons and corporations,” Brody finds that “the better and stronger and more distinctive the artist, the more likely it is that anything he or she does will bear the artist’s mark and embody the artist’s essence. Those who are most endangered by the making of commercials (of whatever sort in whatever medium) are those whose abilities are more fragile, more precarious, more incipient, less developed.” But a dissenting voice appears in the comment section: “The reason that Godard and Anderson can make commercials that feel more like short films is not so much because their talents are more developed; it’s because their reputation is more secure. [ … ] It would be better to regard these commercials as short films financed by a company’s patronage (with a few strings attached) than as commercials proper.”
An even more forceful objection comes from Chris Michael in the Guardian: “Is it worth remaining sceptical about art made in the direct service of a sales pitch? I think it is. Does it cheapen your talent to consistently sell its actual goals to the highest bidder? I think it does. When the goal or persuasive intent does not ‘resonate with audience in meaningful way’, but rather ’employ style to conflate love for artist with love for product’, there’s a genuine, full-frontal, non-imaginary assault on the integrity of the art’s meaning. Better to ask: What meaning? What art? Taking it further, can a car ad ever be art?” When Slate’s Forrest Wickman entered the fray, he hauled a Darren Aronofsky-directed Kohl’s spot in with him to demonstrate that “that there is such a thing as selling out,” comparing it unfavorably with Anderson’s ads as “nothing more than a second-rate ripoff, a cheap copy of ads and music videos past.”
Michael remains unimpressed: “Aronofsky really sold out least: by not prostituting his style and delivery, by not wrapping anything of himself around a dull car or department store, by just doing the job for the money like a professional. That, I can respect.” Responding, Brody holds fast in defense of Anderson’s ads, one of which he calls “a feat of astonishing psychological complexity. “These little films, which happen to be commercials for a car,” he writes, “share not only the style but also the content, the theme, and the emotional and personal concerns, of Anderson’s feature films. Yes, they’re short. Yes, there’s a difference between what can be developed in two hours and what can be developed in thirty seconds—it’s the difference between a poem and a novel, between a song and an opera.” Has Wes Anderson sold out? Is selling out still be possible? As in everything, dear reader, the task of weighing the evidence and making the decision falls ultimately to you.
You have to appreciate the paradox of Banksy: A commercially successful anti-capitalist. A vandal who adds value. It’s the sort of amusing contradiction that appears often in the artist’s own work.
A case in point: In 2009 Banksy made a wall painting on an industrial estate outside Croydon, South London, depicting a spike-headed punk rocker puzzling over a set of instructions. Next to him is a box labeled “LARGE GRAFFITI SLOGAN,” with a jumbled cargo of words–“SYSTEM,” “SMASH,” “POLICE”–spilling out, waiting to be assembled. The logo on the box is also disassembled, but easily recognizable: IKEA.
The guerrilla artist had barely finished his mural when a pair of guerrilla businessmen swooped in, subverting the subversive message. It’s an interesting story, nicely told in this nine-minute film produced for Channel 4 by Martyn Gregory, shot and edited by Paul Bernays and narrated by Nick Glass.
The money quote from his appearance had less to do with economics per se and more with democracy: “We have too many regulations stopping democracy, and not enough regulations stopping Wall Street from misbehaving.” No bullhorns, are you serious?
You probably know Lawrence Lessig because of his work founding Creative Commons and promoting “Free Culture.” (Watch his final speech on Free Culture here.) Several years ago, Lessig moved from Stanford to Harvard, where he took up a new focus — government corruption. That’s what he grapples with in his new book, Republic, Lostand this related video. Given Lessig’s focus on how corporate money corrupts our political system, it’s not surprising that he would have something to say about the potential of the Wall Street protests.
In March 2000, Yale economist Robert Shiller published Irrational Exuberance, a book that warned that the long-running bull market was a bubble. Weeks later, the market cracked and Shiller was the new guru. Fast forward a few years, and Shiller released a second edition of the same book, this time arguing that the housing market was the latest and greatest bubble. We all know how that prediction played out.
Unlike most of the financial industry, Shiller isn’t locked into a perennially bullish view, bent on pumping the market despite what the real numbers suggest. And that should give students, whether young or old, some confidence in his free course simply called “Financial Markets.” Available on the web in multiple formats (YouTube – iTunes Audio – iTunes Video — Yale Web Site), the 26 lecture-course covers the inner-workings of financial institutions that ideally “support people in their productive ventures” and help them manage economic risks. You can start with Lecture 1 here. Above, we present his introductory lecture on Stocks.
Finally (and separately) you can get Shiller’s thoughts on how to handle America’s big debt mess here. It was recorded in recent days.
Shiller’s course appears in the Economics section of our big collection of Free Online Courses. 385 courses in total. Don’t miss them.
Al Jazeera forced many Westerns viewers to take their reporting seriously during the Egyptian uprising this spring, and now the Qatar-based news network has released a timely reportage (Aug. 2) on the fault lines in America — on the gap between rich and poor that only grew wider this week. Alexis de Tocqueville they’re not. There’s no subtle sociology here. But, at the same time, I suspect that this foreign perspective on the U.S. won’t appear unfamiliar to many Americans. The program runs 24 minutes, and other shows in the Fault Lines series can be viewed on YouTube here. H/T @courosa
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