Dude, who even knows.

22nd January 2021

Question reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 19 notes

Anonymous asked: Fair, it was more about the visual look and the particular type of streamlined/cleanliness than the self-awareness, but thanks

kontextmaschine:

I mean it wasn’t a lark, it was a professionally shot and printed promotional item as part of a really high-profile campaign supporting 9 Lives cat food

Actually that’s an American cultural history point - this was in the context of the “ad wars” of the ‘80s. For a bunch of reasons, local and regional brands in consumer staple products had been consolidated into a few rival multiproduct comglomerates with no place to grow further but at each others’ expense; meanwhile the mass audience was still largely corralled into the big 3 TV networks.

So there were a lot of really intense ad campaigns for really trivial everyday products, often going negative on rival lines. The most famous example is Coke v. Pepsi, but there’s things still stuck in my head like the chunkiness of Prego spaghetti sauce vs. Ragu Old World Style, and the vidya “console wars” really came out of this background

Tagged: rerunamhist

  1. kontextmaschine said: @theresponseblog and “🎶Gillette! The best! a man! can get!🎶”
  2. theresponseblog said: I remember how “🎶byyyyy MEN-nen🎶” was a thing on a lot of commercials in the 80s.
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