Vintage Ads That Show Just How Much Society Has Changed

In 1922, you could have tuned in to WEAF New York and heard the first commercial put over the radio. Although the use of broadcast to sell was prohibited at the time, H.M. Blackwell found a way around the law: For ten minutes, he simply talked about the luxuries of living at Queens’ Hawthorne Apartments.

Back in the early 1920s, Tragic Edna served as the spokeswoman for Listerine. She suffered from halitosis, or bad breath, and in a series of ads, the Lambert Pharmaceutical Company suggested its product was the cure. Before this campaign, breath was not considered a medical problem. The company made it into one to sell a product.

Henry Ford knew how to advertise to everyone. Unlike most company's ads, Ford didn't only target men, creating campaigns for women, too. Using the tagline, "Freedom to the woman who owns a Ford," the car became a symbol of complete control.

Then, in 1926, Wheaties created the first radio jingle, "Have You Tried Your Wheaties?" which used a Christmas Eve-inspired tune. Execs wanted listeners to catch an ear worm that wouldn't go away — one that suggested which the best breakfast cereal might be. Wheaties played another prominent role in advertising.

In 1934, Wheaties found more popularity with a new approach to advertising. As sports figures became prominent on tobacco ads, executives copied the idea, using athletes as the faces for the Wheaties cereal brand. "Breakfast of champions" became the cereal's motto.

Cigarettes pushed the advertising envelope. An iconic Camel ad from the era supposed 21 of the 23 Giants baseball World Champions smoked the brand. Executives tried everything to make their products "cool," even tapping some famous faces for marketing campaigns.

Lucky Strike cigarettes — which you may remember as an early client of Don Draper on the AMC hit Mad Men — used Amelia Earhart, the female aviator who disappeared over the Pacific Ocean, on its packaging in 1928. Oddly, she was a non-smoker.

When Lucky Strike moved to Hollywood, the brand found more success once it started collaborating with movie stars. Executives paid movie stars $218,750 in 1937 (worth about $5,700,000 today) to simply endorse the cigarettes. Ads were changing in other ways, too.

See, before 1927, kids and adults entertained themselves with games, radio serial stories, and live events. Then came the television, an incredibly important tool for advertising. The first TV transmission occurred in 1927 and featured Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Executives saw opportunity.

In 1939, Socony-Vacuum, General Mills, and Procter & Gamble eyed the first-ever baseball broadcast featuring the Reds and Dodgers. Though on-air advertising was "illegal" at the time, these companies were able to sneak in content because they were official radio sponsors of the Dodgers. The first legal commercial didn't air for another two years.

With a whopping nine-second ad in 1941, Bulova Watches got the its moment to shine on broadcasted television: "American runs on Bulova time," the company slogan read. Soon longer, more complex ads were beginning to appear — and ground was broken once more.

As the United States dealt with the Great Depression and its lingering effects, the advertising industry found new ways to stay relevant. So, instead of focusing on material goods the public couldn't afford, executives focused on the war effort as the US entered WWll. War bonds decorated with patriotic soldiers became a popular sight, and new mascots arrived.

Rosie the Riveter became one of the most important and popular ad icons in American culture. When WWll sent men into battle, women took over their work back at home. Rosie became a signature American figure and an empowering image for women. Meanwhile, new ads were preaching personal responsibility.

"Only you can prevent wild fires." Any one from the U.S.A will recognize the gruff-voice warning of Smokey Bear. He debuted all the way back in 1944, thanks to a collaboration by the U.S. Forest Service and the Ad Council. How many fires has he prevented in the last 80 years?

In 1949, a lot changed in the avertising industry: Alberta Hays, Dorothy B. McCann, Florence Richards, and Margot Sherman were elected to leadership roles at the legendary advertising company, McCann-Erickson. During a time when women held few high-ranking positions, these four women had secured a rare opportunity and made history.

Nowadays, spotting a political ad on TV is as easy as catching a pharmaceutical commercial. But in 1950, the first-ever political TV ad aired to help Governor General Thomas E. Dewey win an election in New York. Of course, as advertisements grew and morphed, they started utilizing stranger and stranger sales tactics.

The Kool-Aid guy is much older than you might think: He was first created all the way back in 1954, in an ad where a mother poured her kids a glass of Kool-Aid. Although he doesn't help prevent wild fires, the Kool-Aid guy has maintained his iconic status through out the decades.

In the late 1950s, The National Association of Broadcasters saw the danger: Researcher James Vicary conducted an experiment in 1957, which he claimed proved that a .03-second ad encouraged moviegoers to buy popcorn and Coca-Cola. He suggested subliminal messages — ads the audience didn't even know they were seeing — could influence the masses.

Soon advertisers came to realize that, when an ad goes bad, the results are catastrophic. Business kings are reduced to paupers overnight as their loyal customers abandon ship. As companies burn through money trying to recoup the damages, their reputations — and their wallets — often never recover. These companies made some of the biggest marketing blunders of all.

Well-established companies aren’t immune to marketing fails, either. Coca-Cola spent $4 million on a 1990 promotion where they placed actual paper cash, anywhere from $1 to $500, inside brand new “MagiCans” of soda.

Besides the obvious gross factor of having dirty, damp money inside your Coke, the cashless decoy cans became a problem, too, after weighted compartments inside leaked chlorine and ammonium sulfate into the Coke. The promotion was cut short, and only 120,000 cans were ever sold.

During the 1970s, everyone's favorite fast food chain launched a series of commercials set in the fanciful "McDondonald." It made waves, as they were sued for copying the popular T.V. show H.R. Pufnstuf.

Another problem was the alleged false advertising in these commercials. In this magical world, burgers grew out of the ground like heads of lettuce. People believed that this misrepresented the harsh realities of the animal industrial complex while conflating burgers with vegetables.

The Hoover vacuum company ran a disastrous campaign featuring airplanes. In 1992, in order to sell off a product surplus, Hoover's U.K. division began a promotion offering two round-trip tickets to the U.S. with any purchase of £100 or more.

But intercontinental flights cost far more than £100, a fact Hoover forgot. The company lost £48 million on the promotion. The financial hit was so bad that their entire U.K. operation had to be bought out by an Italian manufacturer.

What happened to SunnyCo Clothing? In early 2017, the fledgling swimsuit company ran an Instagram promotion, promising a free red swimsuit to anyone who re-posted an image and tagged the company. "Just pay shipping," they said — but it was SunnyCo who ended up having to pay.

Within a day, the image had been reposted thousands of times. With so many orders, SunnyCo took months to make good on their promise, and sustained massive financial damages in refunds to angry shoppers. The company barely survived and has kept a low profile ever since.

At least SunnyCo didn’t do anything offensive to promote their products. In February 2020, Barnes & Noble tried to honor Black History Month by taking novels by white authors and redesigning the covers to cast black characters...and immediately received backlash.

The internet lit up about it, and the bookstore’s move was universally labeled as “fake diversity” by both readers and authors. “It is not sincere or a solution,” said Bitni series author Dr. Nnedi Okorafor, below. Barnes & Noble canceled the campaign, but not before the damage was done.

In 2009, the World Wildlife Fund made light of national tragedy by comparing a tsunami in Asia to the 9/11 attack. They produced an ad representing the tsunami's catastrophic death toll as hundreds of planes flying toward the World Trade Center.

Even though the ad only ran once in Brazil, the WWF suffered a serious blow. The worst part was that the ad was intended to be offensive: the agency did it on purpose, hoping it would win big awards for its boldness.

Another company that’s no stranger to promoting its products with racial issues? Pepsi. In 2017, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Pepsi took a page from national anti-police-brutality marches and ran an ad where Kendall Jenner brokers peace by giving a Pepsi to an officer.

The commercial was a disaster. Pepsi’s in-house ad team had failed to realize that their creation trivialized the real efforts of civil rights activists, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter tweeted about it. Company president Brad Jakeman resigned six months later.

The 1999 shoe company Just For Feet committed a racial blunder, too. They spent $2.9 million on a Super Bowl commercial in which a Kenyan runner fled, barefoot, from white troops, who tracked him down in a Hummer, drugged his water, and put Just For Feet sneakers on him.

The ad crashed and burned, alongside of its many problematic implications, and the company burned along with it. Just For Feet tried to sue Saatchi & Saatchi, its ad agency, but abandoned the suit and filed for bankruptcy.

It’s a good idea to steer clear of making any offensive statements in ads at all, but no one told Holiday Inn. In 1997, the chain ran a commercial, promoting improvements to their hotels in excess of $1 billion.

The commercial tried to show how far Holiday Inn's dollars would stretch by showing a woman who'd had cosmetic work done, and announcing what each surgery cost. The woman also happened to be transgender, to the horror of her onscreen classmate. Amid justified backlash, the ad was pulled.

Another body-unfriendly ad was the viral Peloton campaign. Launched in December 2019, this commercial featured a woman whose husband gifts her a Peloton stationary bike for the holiday. The woman, already fit, spends hours biking away, but the expression on her face looks terrified rather than delighted.

The ad was called "sexist and dystopian," and Peloton's stock dropped 9%. Some humor came of it, though: just days after the ad aired, Aviation Gin released a commercial with the same Peloton actress, drinking her exercise sorrows away with a smooth beverage.

Internet memes can bring down the mightiest of corporations, and in 2006, even Chevrolet was not immune. They ran a campaign allowing audiences to create Tahoe ads using Chevy-provided footage; users could write their own captions over the video.

The internet loved it. The DIY ads went viral, and instead of promoting the Tahoe, the captions were laden with profanity, called Chevy out for being environmentally unfriendly, or just took on an internet-typical gory tone. Chevy rode it out for a few days, but then axed the campaign.