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8 offensive vintage advertisements....

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Let's see. One could have posted these as 'hilarious ads from the past' but no in today's PC world it has to be posted as 'offensive'.
 
i love ancient ads!

lysol.jpg
 
Nothing's changed much. Now the white male is always the clueless buffoon who needs his hyper intelligent woman or eye-rolling kids to remind him to keep breathing (or his neighbors/friends "of color" to remind him how uncool his is). Last safe target in advertising.
 
SlitheryDee said:
I'm starting to think that a lot of that was meant to be humorous and we're mistaking it for being real opinions. We've become too adapted to a world where advertisers aren't even allowed to joke about that kind of stuff because, obvious humor or not, someone will complain about it. It has conditioned us to assuming that advertisements can only be funny by being nonsensical, and that any other things that occur in them are honest facts. I'm starting to think that people were smart enough, or not narcissistic enough, to assume that most "outrageous" things that they saw in advertising was meant to be humorous and just left it at that. It was later that people discovered how cathartic righteous indignation was and started applying it to everything.
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That's not bad speculation from someone who doesn't understand the culture then, but I think you're incorrect. There could be humorous ads, but these weren't them.

I'm not going to say there wasn't some tongue in cheek element to some of these, but they clearly reflect different culture.

For example, the one with the doctors preferring Camel were not humorous. Tobacco companies did try to spread the message that cigarettes were healthy at times - and then spent decades trying to persuade the public that the science wasn't conclusive that they were dangerous when science said they were, probably killing millions more by that.
 
Leyawiin said:
Nothing's changed much. Now the white male is always the clueless buffoon who needs his hyper intelligent woman or eye-rolling kids to remind him to keep breathing (or his neighbors/friends "of color" to remind him how uncool his is). Last safe target in advertising.
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There's some truth to that, because some ads do want someone to be the idiot, and the white male is the 'safest' target.

But don't forget the reason, because of the history of discrimination against the other groups making ads against them offensive.

I do cringe at some of the tasteless excesses done against white men, though.
 
Angry Irishman said:
Why in the hell would someone be offended by ads done years ago in a different era all together.....get a life and worry about shit that matters.
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We're not offended by them in the way you say. We're saying we find the cultural views that made those ads ok to publish at the time are offensive, we're glad they've changed.
 
George Washington owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson was one of the largest slave owners of Virginia.

You can't apply social norms of one era to another
 
Craig234 said:
That's not bad speculation from someone who doesn't understand the culture then, but I think you're incorrect. There could be humorous ads, but these weren't them.

I'm not going to say there wasn't some tongue in cheek element to some of these, but they clearly reflect different culture.

For example, the one with the doctors preferring Camel were not humorous. Tobacco companies did try to spread the message that cigarettes were healthy at times - and then spent decades trying to persuade the public that the science wasn't conclusive that they were dangerous when science said they were, probably killing millions more by that.
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I'll give you the misrepresented, misleading, and/or outdated medical data being used in the cigarette ads. A lot of food ads like the one for giving babies 7-up would fall under that as well. Some of that was because they just didn't know any better, and some of it was outright lying when they did know better. I'm mostly thinking about the ones that seem to denigrate women though.
 
OMG that was so F-ing LOL, thanks OP, 'Blow in her face and she'll follow you anywhere"...I'm not so sure about that because she will have to get to the bathroom first for a wet cloth!
 
ITT: people getting mad at people getting mad at people getting mad at people getting mad at people getting mad.

The obvious solution is to not give a fuck.
 
Ice_Dragon said:
Some I might understand though I don't understand the one for Camel.
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That was likely during the period where the first rumblings that cigarettes might not be so good for your health were really gaining traction. That ad feels a little like it might be a response to something. Notice that they were careful to not declare openly that the fact that doctors smoked camels meant that camels were healthy. They left that as merely a strong implication. A company that really believed their product was healthy would have gleefully trumpeted that fact to the heavens, even if they did turn out to be wrong later. This ad is from a company that doesn't believe what it is trying to imply.
 
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Ice_Dragon said:
Some I might understand though I don't understand the one for Camel.
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It requires a *very* liberal definition of offensive. If you don't get offended when a leaf blows in front of you while driving, you likely don't have the prerequisites to understand its offensiveness. What makes it offensive is the tacit endorsement by doctors that say Camel cigarettes are a pretty good thing to smoke.
 
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