Angel Delight
Woman / 17th August 1973
A triumph? More like a bloody miracle…
Tags: Angel Delight, dodgy advice, food, kids, retail
The Hostess With the Mostest
Woman / 17th August 1973
Just because I think this is rather a cute advert, and because I want ALL of that ice-cream.
Tags: blatant sexism, food, kids, retail, Walls
Elastoplast
Woman's Own / 21st March 1969
Ah, now this is another lovely advert, not only because the little girl is gorgeous, but because the shot of her is so beautifully framed as well. Her tears look a bit like snot, sadly, but this doesn’t affect the arresting effect of the advert! Look at that FACE. Don’t you want to give her a packet of Cadbury’s Buttons to cheer her up?
Tags: Elastoplast, health, kids, retail
Children’s Ailments
Woman's Weekly / 9th March 1957
Presumably the whooping cough vaccine was in its early days, as I don’t think a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to it would be considered necessary nowadays, a tribute to just how successful the vaccination programme has been. My mother, born in the early 1940s, survived whooping cough as a baby, which made her fortunate, but I was even more fortunate not to have to face the risk.
Tags: health, kids, motherhood
Take the Pain Away, Mummy!
Woman's Weekly / 9th March 1957
Hm. I don’t have a problem with giving children something to ease symptoms of illness at all, but I don’t think this type of emotional blackmail is quite on, do you?
Tags: adverts totally made of wrong, blatant sexism, dodgy advice, emotional blackmail, health, kids, motherhood, retail
Ladybird
Woman's Own / 16th August 1968
Aw. So many British children were taken into town to be dressed by Ladybird, Woolworths’ range of childrens’ clothing. Alas, no more: Woolworths was a high-profile victim of the recent recession, but the clothing (as well as the shop) survives online. I thought this charming advert was a nice tribute.
Tags: blatant sexism, kids, Ladybird, motherhood, retail, social history
Band Aid
Woman's Own / 20th March 1970
Sigh. An ad from a more innocent time, where the word ‘gang’ could be used without negative connotations, and plasters were sold in metal canisters. I wonder if selling metal canisters nowadays, to be refilled at a chemist, would be a good way to cope with the large amount of card waste that must occur from modern card boxes, although it’s possibly more trouble than it’s worth.
Anyway, the main reason I put this up was because the boys in the ad look rather sweet, and I was taken by the phonetic spelling of ‘thousands’. I’m sure kids used to look cuter in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
The Complete Sweet
Woman's Own / 20th June 1969
Of course, ice cream with various syrups and toppings are commonplace nowadays, but clearly it wasn’t until the late ’60s that ice cream ‘ripples’ became common. This advert, from Lyons Maid, now part of the Walls behemoth, adopts quite a patronising tone, but it’s tough not to sound like that when you’re instructing the nation’s housewives that they don’t need to add anything to the product. Although I don’t think a glace cherry is going to spoil this young boy’s Strawberry Ripple, I can see their point that old habits die hard, and what brightens up plain ice cream would crowd a ‘complete sweet’. I wonder when that name fell out of use? In any case, this does provide some amusing context to the activities of Sunshine Desserts in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, published some six years later.
Tags: blatant sexism, food, ice cream, kids, Lyons Maid, motherhood, retail, social history