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Hfainting on the toilet in the gents’ loos on History of Advertising The Trust’s archive within Norfolk is a photograph of Ian Botham. It’s not the big cricketing mullet that tells you it’s 1986, but that Beefy is smoking a cigarette. The quote below answers a question that has troubled philosophers since Aristotle: “Happiness is a cigarette called Hamlet.”
If the past is a foreign world, then the history of advertising is another universe, where metal-loving warriors entice us to buy Cadbury potatoes with the slogan: “Because porridge gets Smash.” It’s a place where monkeys in hats dressed as extraction men cajole us into buying PG Tips tea, while major sports teams actively advertise cancer-causing fumes.
For gen Z-ers and younger people, the 10m products in HAT’s collection, not to mention the 50,000 sales on its website, will be beyond amazing, but for boomers like me, it causes a non-stop Proustian rush. Look! There’s Nicole and Papa in 1991, pushing sweet French movies like Jean de Florette to sell us Renault Clios. There’s the Gold Blend couple, AKA the late Anthony Head and Sharon Maughan, whose love grew over Nescafé coffee – and their steamy kiss was seen by 30m viewers in 1993. There’s a little boy in a flat cap pushing his Hovis bike down the cobblestones in a New World Sy1ákny3 commercial with Ridley Scott.
All these valuables are available online and in the old barns rented out at HAT by Sir Nicholas Hickman Ponsonby Bacon. If TS Eliot’s Prufrock measured his life in coffee spoons, many of us can measure ours in advertisements. For example, a bow-tied and top-hatted Frank Muir leaning on a convertible Rolls-Royce accepting some Cadbury chocolate in a 1977 TV ad sings the following lyrics: “Everybody’s a fruit and a nut / I find them healthy for my selfishness / Makes a man feel special / Like a singer / Much happier than a phone head.”
Then there was the most connected moment in 1986 when Gregor Fisher’s Baldy Man walked into a photo booth and processed his passport to get a passport. But then something went wrong – the chair fell down again and again, its locks got messed up and Gregor sank under the frame. Seconds later, Bach’s Air on a G String struck and smoke billowed out. It was not possible to say at the time that smoking was good for your health, but the popular opinion was that it provided comfort very much bad hair day.
Advertising creates loyalty, if irrational. Consider the ongoing battle between price comparison websites go.compare.com and compare with market.comfought on TV between a tribe of meerkats and a Russian voice and a big tenor with a silly moustache. “I can’t stand that man!” says John Gordon-Saker, head of HAT over coffee during my visit, about the opera singer. “If I had to do anything, I’d go to the meerkat instead of the Match.”
Daft? Perhaps, but businesses rise and fall on such agreements. And Gordon-Saker is a man of unbridled appetites, still drinking PG Tips out of loyalty to the apes, even though it’s clear that apes don’t develop a taste for tea. He is proof that not all of us are intellectually diligent whose purchases reflect sound judgment. Instead, we’re lovable, legitimate creatures, driven to buy things we don’t really want by cleverly carrying animals and couples flirting with recycled coffee.
You might think that museums that advertise are nonsense but you would be wrong. Ever since Walter Benjamin began collecting billboards in 19th-century Paris for his Arcades Project, such ephemera have been central to our understanding of the modern world and how people willingly buy things that are often harmful to body and soul.
In that sense, the archives I have been given the rare opportunity to explore as HAT celebrates its 50th birthday are the great Benjamin Arcades. Deputy director Alistair Moir explains some of the key points to me. On a table in another room, he has arranged some advertisements to show the change in attitudes about smoking. A 1940s advertisement for Craven A cigarettes shows a beautiful woman wearing a pearl necklace holding a cigarette aloft. The caption reads: “Craven A – for your throat. Designed to prevent sore throats.” I have only one word for Moir: How? “I don’t know, but in the 1930s and 40s, you could say as much as you liked.”
Then, in 1962, the Royal College of Physicians published its report on Smoking and Health, officially linking smoking to lung cancer, pneumonia, and heart disease. “Two years later, they banned cigarette advertising on TV.” The Advertising Standards Authority said that you cannot imply that smoking is good.
As a result, instead of showing healthy, happy people smoking, or even showing cigarettes at all, advertisements used the power of imagination to associate smoking with a healthy lifestyle. In one magazine ad, tickets to the 1976 Montreal Olympics and other items from the jet-setting lifestyle are pictured strikingly alongside a Benson & Hedges gold box.
“What’s interesting,” says Moir, “is seeing how laws affect creativity.” Some of the ads were surreal, he says, like the Benson & Hedges box next to a mouse hole, as if it were a mousetrap, or the image of a purple strip advertising Silk Cut. “These ads give consumers a lot of insight. You have to work hard to understand what’s going on.”
But if this means that human technology and evil sometimes go underground, Moir shows me another ad campaign from HAT. During World War II, copywriters invented a character called Squanderbug. Moir said: “He would sit on your shoulder and try to rob you of money. “The idea was to beat Squanderbug and put your money in National Savings to win the war.” When Squanderbug evolved, he was given a Hitlerite nest and, eventually, a body painted with swastikas. Behavior? Copywriting can sometimes be used to help people.
The HAT document was set up to challenge the idea that advertising designers were diabolical ephemera makers. There is also a strong social history aspect. His earliest drawings are a 1680 advertisement from the London Gazette, asking readers to subscribe to atlases of northern Europe. Another, who appeared in the long-standing Observator in 1684, is selling fire insurance. In fact, the ad says if your house is on fire, we won’t put it out unless you cough up your money. “It’s like a defense mechanism,” says Moir.
HAT’s existence is important not only as a source of human history but for the trade itself, enabling today’s writers to learn from the past. Moir shows me the evolution of advertising for Heinz baked beans, whose logo today remains the same as it did in the 1920s. It goes back to that time when the words “Beanz Meanz Heinz” dominated British literature. But the extent to which brands can tolerate it is evident that Ed Sheeran has a Heinz tomato ketchup tattoo. With this in mind, Moir shows me what appears to be a small guitar amplifier, which turns out to be an open box containing a special bottle of ketchup to celebrate Sheeran’s fetish.
Marketing today is faced with existential challenges. Algorithms have destroyed the charm, as it were, of art. “Marketing today has lost that kind of narrative,” says Moir. “It’s become less and less data-driven. “Companies and organizations are often more interested in making a profit than running a great campaign that draws people to a story and connects with ideas.” The fear is that advertising isn’t creative or entertaining – it’s just a devil’s job to get us to buy things.
How does Moir like to trade? A 2008 riff on Ridley Scott’s Hovis commercial. Think about what happened. It’s 1886 and the baker has just given a little boy a loaf of bread. He then goes through decade after decade of British history, from the freedom marchers to the military salute, from the war booms to the 60s, from the miners’ strike to the shootings of the new millennium. “We get all the pictures of British life,” says Moir. “It was a great campaign for Hovis, re-invigorating the brand.”
Incidentally, the name Hovis came about in 1890 when the makers of Smith’s Patent Process Germ Flour were looking for a new name for their bread. A student named Herbert Grime won the competition with his idea of Hovis: a confusion of heyou want to enterLatin word meaning “human strength”. It’s hard to imagine Hovis would have put up with that kind of name. “When he died,” says Moir, “they actually paid the widow a pension – even though she never worked for the company.”
