Buygone Ad Of The Week: Drano

Once a week (or so), Copyranter brings you retro advertising good/badness. “Our relationship was headed down the drain…because the bathwater wasn’t. You see, Herbert liked to trim his hair and pubes in the shower, not to mention masturbate (His huge morning poop-poops also stopped up the hopper, but the force-cup plunger Joe the plumber gave me after I gave him a handjob always worked.). After he dressed, Herbert would shuffle into the kitchen for his buttered toast. He’d sit down and look at it and say either “too light” or “too dark.” He’d sip his coffee and mumble “too weak” or “too strong.” Meanwhile, the bathwater was s-l-o-w-l-y emptying. Read more »

Buygone Ad Of The Week: Cutty Sark

Once a week (or so), Copyranter brings you retro advertising good/badness. The year: 1971. The drink: Cutty Sark whisky. The understood, but not printed, word at the end of that badass mothafuckin’ headline: “bitch.” The dilemma: how to market uppity Scottish hooch to young black men angry after fighting and dying in a useless white man’s war against Communism. The solution: tell the angry black man that he is now in command—of his life, and of his woman. Your good-time party schooner has arrived, “right on time,” and you are the captain. Sure, give your first mate a taste, but why don’t you just keep hold of the glass, my man? |Image: Flickr/vintage advertising|

Buygone Ad Of The Week: Valium

Thank fucking tranquilizers it’s Friday. I’ve been trying to write one—ONE—simple, little, goddamn 30-second radio spot for three days. I have that horrible irregular writer feeling of not being able to create feces with ex-lax right now. I do not have a prescription to Valium® or any other Diazepam. Like many New Yorkers, I do have one for Klonopin®, which is a Clonazepam. Both drugs are brilliant marketing creations of Hoffman-LaRoche—creations that have netted the Nutley, NJ pharmaceutical giant billions of bucks. This disturbing, anxiety-inducing Valium ad from the 60s would of course never fly today. But since I’m a fool who scans about 100 ad/pop/culture sites every day, I am seeing it today. And I am about to break a Klonopin tablet in half, and walk to my office’s water cooler. I won’t be pulling a Roy Steinmetz today. You win, Hoffman-LaRoche. Have a calm weekend, folks.
|Image via: vintage ads|

Buygone Ad of the Week: ‘Til Death

It’s time for another Buygone Ad Breakdown! We go back to 1932, when dandies somehow blew smokes rings at their dames without opening their mouths, and cigarettes were good for you. “It’s Toasted”—so too, eventually, were their lungs. But let’s forget death for a sec, because this is an engaging portrait of everlasting love. And, since it was the time of the Great Depression, I guess men—even well-to-do swells—couldn’t afford diamond engagement rings. So, they instead somehow mastered blowing priceless 100-karat smoke replicas when asking their lucky sweeties to marry them. “Quick Marion, stick your head through it before it dissipates!”
Image: Modern Mechanix

Buygone Ad of the Week: Club Soda IS Sex

Also? It tingles when you stick your dick in it…Back in the Swingtown 70s, everybody was hornier and hairier and having sex with everyone and anything. As the copy on this Canada Dry ad reads: “The only thing better than a club soda that’s full of life at the end of a party is a girl who’s full of life at the end of a party.” But what were you to do if all the chicks had splitzo, man? Hop into the shower, pour some ice cold bubbling club soda on your swizzle stick, think about Farrah Fawcett (or Lee Majors) and rub one out. Canada Dry Club Soda—turns any picnic into a dicknic!
Ad: via Vintage Advertising
-Copyranter