There was a time when commercials were high art, not just high price. In the days when there were three networks and no DVRs, advertisers had a captive audience. Advertising was the only way that content was paid for. There were no subscription services and of course no streaming.
The world of 1972
Back in 1972, commercials were very different. Overall they were slower and more direct — nothing like the “image advertising” you see today. It was also pretty politically incorrect, goofy, and much sillier than you probably remember.
I’m willing to bet that our Solid Signal audience will really appreciate this video I found showing almost an hour of commercials from late 1971 and 1972. If you’re part of the generation that saw the USA in your Chevrolet, a lot of these will look familiar. If you’re more of the Tamagotchi and Ninja Turtles type, you’ll laugh at what passed for “high quality advertising” back when your grandparents were in their prime.
One thing that strikes me is that the world we see in these commercials isn’t the world that younger people would associate with “the 1970s.” That decade has been pictured so often in terms of discos and bell bottoms, and these commercials tell the real story. The world of the past is seldom the way it’s portrayed in the 1970s and I think that’s why these kind of mundane documents are really important.
That’s not to say that the world in this video was the “real” 1972. People in the real world rarely have animated characters follow them around. They even more rarely burst into song. And, if Raquel Welch actually used drugstore hair dye, well color me surprised. But it’s still worthwhile to see the world that advertisers thought would appeal to the people of the time.
YouTuber “FredFlix’s” commitment
YouTuber “FredFlix” has assembled a lot of great content from old TV shows on their channel. Here’s another look at the early 1970s, this time in the context of the TV shows those commercials appeared in.
I always wonder where this old stuff comes from. I mean, somehow it had to transcend time and space to get to us in the 21st century. VCRs were rare in the early 1970s — the Betamax wouldn’t even reach homes until 1975, so somehow these had to come from old broadcast archives. These would have been stored on film or an obsolete video tape format. Then, they would have to be miraculously stored for over fifty years. Every time someone wanted to through them out, someone would have to stop them. Then, that obsolete media would have to be digitized and posted, all for your pleasure.
The archivists of the future will have a different problem
Assuming that the world’s computers don’t self-destruct when the AIs take over (which is seeming more and more like a stone-cold fact), the archivists of 2073 will have a very different problem than those of 2023. When we look back 50 years, there’s not a lot to really go on. A lot of that stuff was lost and there wasn’t much to begin with. Today, we as a society produce more content in an hour than the world produced in an entire year. That’s no exaggeration. The real question will be in 2073, what’s still relevant? What matters, and what represents the world as we know it today? I’ll probably be gone by then, so I’m glad it will be someone else’s problem.
