Book Review: Outrageous Ads

By M. Scott Carter
The Moore American

MOORE May 15, 2008 11:21 am

— Maybe it’s because I work in the newspaper business.
And, just maybe, it’s because I understand the difficult — at best — relationship journalists have with advertising people.
Or, heck, it might be that I just like to laugh.
Whatever the reasons, I read and re-read Kate Parker’s silly, but scary little green book, “Outrageous Ads.”
This isn’t an in-depth, analytical look at how the advertising industry has urged us to adopt and use its products.
Instead, this little book lets the industry speak for itself.
With ads dating from the late 1800s to the 1950s, this book shows example after example of why people felt it was okay to drink beer and drive a car.
Or what many really believed, that doctors would prescribe scotch for health problems.
Yeah, I’m still laughing.
Parker asks what the doctor smokes.
And when she’s not questioning the experts in the advertisements, she wondering about the products, themselves.
Take, for example, the Child Reducer and Beautifier, the remedy for “fat folk” or the free hair growth formula.
“Perhaps the real reason the ads in this book make us laugh out loud is because they come from eras with completely different ideas and values from ours,” Parker writes. “Where pesticide-covered oranges were a good thing and sun lamps were genuinely used to ward off the flu in children.”
She’s right.
Years ago, we didn’t worry about pesticides or seatbelts or lung cancer.
Or at least Madison Avenue didn’t worry about those things.
Instead, they urged us to worry about smelly underwear, white teeth, soft hair and bright teeth.
And, Parker says, things have not changed.
“We may think we’re much more sophisticated now, but under all the gloss of modern marketing, has much really changed?” she asks. “Next time you’re convinced you need the latest, must-have product, look back at this book and beware.
She’s right.
And that’s why I simply had to have this book.
“Outrageous Ads,” all 96 pages of it, is published by Red Rock Press of New York.
For more information, e-mail info@redrockpress.com.