Ads Without Products
December 5, 2010 2:16 PM   Subscribe

I thought I might try crowdsourcing a bit of knowledge. I have a rather elaborate question about the history of advertising and I'm at a bit of a loss where to even start looking. The short version: what is the history of ads that make no mention of the products?

I'm RAing for a prof, and he's operating on a "hunch" that, within his lifetime, ads have shifted gears, away from describing the benefits of products and toward simply having an ad that draws attention to the product in some way, but doesn't necessarily make any claims about it. I'm supposed to find resources for him, but I'm having a little trouble even figuring out where to start. What kinds of terms should I be searching for (viral ads comes to mind)? What kinds of books should I be looking at? Are there major essays/books in marketing research or marketing psychology that paved the way for ads like this? Are there specific ad campaigns that broke new ground? If you have non-U.S. sources, I'd love to see them, as well. Also, is he onto something with this hunch or not? I think of the decoder rings in cereal: they had nothing to do with the product itself, but were simply a ruse to get kids to want it more, and this was over fifty years ago.

I'd like as much primary-source info as possible (that includes research-papers that broke new ground, as well as specific campaigns), but I'd also like good histories of advertising that may discuss precisely this phenomenon.

It would also be worthwhile to include anti-brand type things, like the Starbucks coffee shops in New York that don't have a name.

Feel free to interpret loosely; I'll do the filtering and narrowing of topic stuff on my own.
posted by outlandishmarxist to Media & Arts (27 answers total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
"Corporate Advertising" advertises a corporation as a whole and doesn't always include the actual products it makes.
posted by thylacine at 2:29 PM on December 5, 2010


You'd do well to start with Raymond Williams's classic essay "Advertising: The Magic System." There's also a pretty good collection of essays on twentieth-century European advertising called Selling Modernity--you may find something relevant there.
posted by nasreddin at 2:29 PM on December 5, 2010




Is your prof watching Mad Men? It's obviously fictional, but it frequently draws quite directly from real advertising history (especially in the early seasons). A site like Footnotes of Mad Men might be really helpful in getting you started.

A great book to counterveil the prof's thesis: Propaganda, written by Freud's nephew in 1928.
posted by gerryblog at 2:31 PM on December 5, 2010


I was just coming back to suggest that Williams essay! I used it in my summer course on television. Definitely look at it. Baudrillard has some essays on advertising too; I used one called "Absolute Advertising, Ground-Zero Advertising."
posted by gerryblog at 2:33 PM on December 5, 2010


Not quite as stark as you'd like but I'd start with searching the terms 'brand marketing' vs. 'direct response marketing'. In broad strokes brand marketing advertises the brand and aims to get consumers to think of a brand or product in a certain way (i.e. 'this is a cool brand' or 'this is a brand I'd show off to other people) while direct response advertising aims to have the consumers go out and buy something right now

Big brands will typically employ both tactics using brand advertising as a brand building tactic (i.e. reaching large amounts of people and convincing them that x brand fits in with their life) and using direct response as a 'right now' tactic (i.e. go out and get the computer that's 50% off today.)

The type of advertising you're talking about is a subset of brand advertising. I don't know that there'd be a word for it (subtle brand marketing?) but thought I'd point you in the right direction.
posted by jourman2 at 2:36 PM on December 5, 2010 [2 favorites]


Not a history, but you might be interested in a critical analysis of how "ads without the product" work: Semiotics & Advertising
posted by bradbane at 2:38 PM on December 5, 2010 [2 favorites]


First thing that popped to mind was the old Maxell Tape ad, which I'm nure even had a logo or anything on it. For the exact opposite of what you are looking for, check here, you might find something to contrast etc
posted by timsteil at 2:40 PM on December 5, 2010 [1 favorite]


Also, just wanted to note that most ad campaigns will make mention of the brand in some way, even if its not in the first creative iteration. For example, brand may choose to create intrigue before a campaign fully launches by creating a 'teaser campaign' that aims to get people talking about 'hey did you see that weird ad that didn't mention any products the other night' type of deal, but I'd say I've seen less and less of them over time.
posted by jourman2 at 2:41 PM on December 5, 2010


The Advertising History Timeline from AdAge is a "295-year synopsis of the most important events in American Advertising." Unfortunately it ends at 1999, but there's bound to be more recent information on the site.

There's also a list of the Top 100 Ad Campaigns of the Century. (Again, not up-to-date, but will point you toward some of early ad campaigns.)
posted by lucysparrow at 2:43 PM on December 5, 2010


Best answer: Tobacco advertising is a key part of this story. As the restrictions on tobacco advertising grew more severe, the ad agencies responded by coming up with more 'subliminal' image-based campaigns -- most famously (in Britain, at any rate) the Silk Cut advertisements that never mentioned the name of the brand.

For primary sources, see the remarkable Tobacco Papers website, where you can 'search, view and download over 650 documents from the UK tobacco industry's main advertising agencies ranging from 1994 to 1999', a rare glimpse behind the scenes of the advertising process.
posted by verstegan at 2:57 PM on December 5, 2010 [1 favorite]


An example: the IBM Linux ads.

An article on Slate about them by Seth Stevenson. NPR version of the same article.
posted by nangar at 3:00 PM on December 5, 2010


The term brand marketing is what I was thinking too. So you might start with looking at where and when that term originated.
posted by COD at 3:01 PM on December 5, 2010


Response by poster: A couple of follow-ups: I'm not just looking for ads that don't mention the products (the title was a bit of an in-joke). I'm also looking for the history of ads that don't tout the virtues of a product, but rather, use some other aspect to sell it - entertainment, coolness, image, etc. If there's legislation, for instance, that opened up the ground for ads to be pure pleasure, rather than descriptions of a product. Or if there's psychological studies that shifted the terrain.
posted by outlandishmarxist at 3:28 PM on December 5, 2010


Response by poster: Also, any idea what the first cinematic television ad was? In the 50s, TV ads were generally all of the same form: spokesperson behind a counter peddling the product.
posted by outlandishmarxist at 3:33 PM on December 5, 2010


Best answer: Your prof is mistaken in their basic premise.

I would refer you (or them) to the several comic essays by S.J. Perelman about advertising published in The New Yorker in the early 1950s. They are quite specifically about how ridiculous ads are when they don't mention the product, or when they try to sell products using "snob appeal" or similar.

The only one of these that I remember enough of to pull up a Google result is this, but as I recall there are at least three--in one of them, he goes to a store to buy some article of menswear and they forbid him to have it because he's not the kind of elegant man who's their target market.

As for filmed television ads (I presume that's what you mean by "cinematic"), they were around in the early 1950s as well. This is from 1952, but I think the campaign started in 1951.
posted by Sidhedevil at 4:58 PM on December 5, 2010


As a consumer, it seemed like in the late 90's, television ads became visually arresting but if you blinked, you'd miss the actual product. I remember that ad in '98 or so that used the wall-of-sound sweeping choral ending to Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" with gorgeous images of billowing fabric, flapping birds, large wings...and...and...I would swear for years I had no idea what the damn ad was pitching. All I knew was that I had to locate or buy the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" because that ad reminded me how terrific that song was/is.

Much later, I think I learned that that ad was by Motorola. Still don't know what Motorola was selling.....
posted by Jezebella at 6:09 PM on December 5, 2010


Maybe you're looking for something closer to this? It's almost always cited as one of the earliest examples of an ad that appeals to a basic emotional desire.
posted by lucysparrow at 6:28 PM on December 5, 2010


Forgot to add: As the blog mentions, the authenticity of the ad is under debate, but it's still often used as an example in the ad world. (I used to be a copywriter many years ago, so I came across it quite often in reading about the history of advertising.)
posted by lucysparrow at 6:33 PM on December 5, 2010


The "Shackleton advertisement" has been pretty definitively shown to be false (some very lovely person looked through reams of classified advertisements on microfiche, in a bunch of newspapers, for six months before Shackleton's letter in the Times until the date of sailing, with no such advertisement appearing anywhere--according to the notes of I forget which of the many fine recent books about the Endurance expedition; I remember noticing this with joy because I had always thought it seemed fishy).

That said, I'm not sure why the Shackleton advertisement, if it were real, would be an illustration of the point the OP's prof is trying to prove? It's a pretty accurate description of what one might expect on a polar expedition, and Shackleton was well-known as an organizer of polar expeditions, so I'm not seeing any disconnect between the wording of the advertisement and what is being advertised--am I missing some key point (quite possible, as I do that an awful lot)?



Moving on from me perhaps being dim: There are a ton of print ads from the 19th and early 20th century that don't depict the product, but instead feature some random nonsense (poems, illustrations not depicting the product) and then just the name of the product at the bottom of the page. Any early 20th-century issue of The Saturday Evening Post should yield you a bunch of them--there was a soap that advertised with cutesy faux-Watteau vignettes with little poems about lovely ladies and what-not that never mentioned the name of the soap until the bottom strapline, for instance. Will try to find some online for you to see.
posted by Sidhedevil at 7:37 PM on December 5, 2010


Aha! A quick Google found me this famous example from The Saturday Evening Post, 1915.
posted by Sidhedevil at 7:42 PM on December 5, 2010


No, no, you're not dim; I'm just too tired to be posting. I started thinking about early examples of ads that "sell the sizzle, not the steak"--i.e., the benefits (beauty, power, safety, peace of mind, etc.) over the features. The Shackleton ad, although as we agree is thought to be fake, is nevertheless often used as an example of this style of advertising. But not what the OP is looking for, so I'm going to bow out before I further muddle the question.
posted by lucysparrow at 9:02 PM on December 5, 2010


In the pharma world, make sure you take a look at the concept of reminder ads, which have their own unique (less strict) regulatory requirements.
posted by deludingmyself at 9:21 PM on December 5, 2010


The entire first section of No Logo by Naomi Klein is devoted to advancing a very similar thesis -- that advertising has shifted from concrete and product-centered to abstract and brand-centered. (It goes on to argue that de-emphasizing products' physical properties/history gives manufacturers space to cut quality and labor standards without people noticing.)

The book is an anti-corporate polemic, but it cites primary sources, so it may give you some useful leads even if you reject its overarching argument.
posted by introcosm at 9:37 PM on December 5, 2010


For a broader narrative around the shift from benefit-oriented advertising to advertising that creates/exploits desire, you can also look at The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis. The whole thing is on Google Video.
posted by mondaygreens at 9:47 PM on December 5, 2010


United Colors of Benetton are masters at this type of ad campaign.
posted by just_ducky at 11:14 PM on December 5, 2010 [1 favorite]


Think Different

From Wiki: "The first rule of the campaign was that there would be no products in the ads. Clow and the rest of the creative team ( at Chiat Day) were very concerned with appearing to exploit the artists who's images they used. Instead of being paid, all of the participants (or their estates) were given money and computer equipment to be donated to the charities or non-profits of their choice."
posted by Gungho at 6:20 AM on December 6, 2010


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