Classic Ads From Simpler Times

Ah yes, simpler times.

Prepare to be entertained by;

(a) An old-fashioned Old-Etonian pervert.

(b) The Queen and her bowel problems.

(c) The ad-industry giant now forced to live in a cave in the middle-east because he hit Nigella.

(d) A Belgian bloke with a face like Ivy Tilsley after the plastic surgery.

Have a listen and join us back in 2013 as we take a look at the sixth advert in a series called Live Test which Swedish advertising agency Forsman & Bodenfors had created for Volvo Trucks.

This one is called ‘Epic Splits’ and stars Jean Claude Van Damme and a couple of really big articulated lorries going backwards at speed.

Think about it. Can you see it in your mind's eye?

No you can't. You can’t do it.

Nothing prepares you for the epic nature of this ad. Nothing. Don’t believe me?

Drop into our Youtube channel at https://youtu.be/ws0BchvYj4Y and watch Jean-Claude Van Damme in all his wince-inducing, leg-splitting glory.

Oh and Enya sings.

Get in touch at [email protected] with questions or if you’d like to suggest an ad for us to review and in the meantime, give us a like on any of the socials but more importantly STAY SAFE PEOPLE!

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In this week’s episode we hear how a Two Ronnies parody of a bread ad wiped the memories of 1,000 people and then find out why Ken Barlow and Joanna Lumley’s love child got a pudding bowl haircut and spent two days cycling up and down a hill in Dorset.

You’ll need to prepare yourself as we enter the murky world of political campaigning and expose the role played by verucas in shaping the course of the Brexit campaign.

The people who voted it the most heartwarming TV ad ever are all now sat by the sunny window looking forward to telling Jonny Foreigner to fuck off back where he came from then wondering why there’s nobody around to clean the window after they just licked it.

So gather your disappointments around you as we slog up the really steep hill of an ad that first aired in 1973 and then proceeded to weasel itself into the hearts of a nation. Is it for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party or for nostalgia-peddlers Hovis? You be the judge.

Here’s the Youtube link if you must watch it https://youtu.be/IbLUbcbd27s and this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkonymPyp5g&t=91s links to a short documentary by the British Film Institute detailing how they restored the original film, digitised it to 4k then gave it back to Hovis so they could recycle the original saccharin, sentimental, post-war nostalgia-fest and claim it was a marketing gift to the nation.

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It’s an ethical dilemma that doesn’t exist.

We get paid to make ads that sell stuff that people get paid to make so that they can go out and buy stuff that we make adverts for.

You know how it goes, and it’s not our problem if the stuff you’re paying us to sell is shit right?

No matter how much we explain our role in the free market economy you still all hate us apparently. None more so than Jerry Seinfeld.

Jerry’s a hypocrite and he’s quite mean as well, although he does have a collection of 150 vintage cars so…yay Jerry the Aldi Jay Leno!

Have a listen as Jerry is mean to a bunch of ad people at an awards ceremony where he’s receiving an award for doing the work that they paid him to do so he can buy more vintage cars.

Here he is being a smug cunt on our YouTube channel https://youtu.be/qifGWbFzNKQ

Enjoy. Or not as the case may be.

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Is your life mundane? Do you hate your job? Is your world full of people who aren’t happy that you drive like an Italian plumber?*

Yes?

Never mind. Watch this ad and it’ll be OK to tell the world that your best mate is an animated marsupial** or that all you really want do with your life is take on jobs for various crime syndicates in a world that allows you to do whatever you need to get the job done.***

Welcome to Classic Ads From Simpler Times where in this episode you can join Steve and Tones for some consequence-free living as they review the 1996 Playstation TV commercial, Double-Life. The ad that told us that it’s glamorous to spend the weekend knee-deep in crisp packets and coke cans because it’s OK to put more effort into your digital life than it is into your real life.

It's a multi-cultural art movie featuring the cutest Scottish boy who ever lived so have a look at the ad for yourself on our Youtube channel at https://youtu.be/Gjt7sSd2G3Y

Get in touch at [email protected] with questions or if you’d like to suggest an ad for us to review.

In the meantime, subscribe, give us a like, look for us on Twitter and stay safely at home FFS.

* Yes, OK, Mario Kart’s a Nintendo game.

** Crash Bandicoot

*** Grand Theft Auto

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Is it ever OK to celebrate great advertising for shit products?

Join as we discuss the issue in our review of an ad for the brand-new Fiat Strada, a car handbuilt by robots out of tissue paper.

No voiceover, no shots of the car driving around town with a British man at the wheel smoking a pipe and smacking his children at the traffic lights. Simply a ballet of machinery accompanied by an opera, with a nod to Star Wars and The Italian Job.

Join us in a world where the working class has been abolished and see the ad for yourself on our Youtube channel at https://youtu.be/U3SIWulBkiE

If you have questions or you want to suggest an ad for us to review email us at [email protected] and in the meantime, subscribe, give us a like, look for us on Twitter and stay safe out in there.

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Life imitates art. Advertising steals art. Agency usually calls it derivative to avoid lawyer stuff. In this case French artist-man says he doesn’t care as long as he can go to Los Angeles and spunk £400,000 making a telly ad. So off we go…

Who do you turn to when you’ve just closed 11 of your 22 factories and laid off 6,000 workers?

Bartle Bogle Hegarty of course.

There are two theories about how to win an argument with John Hegarty and as we’ll hear, neither works. So settle down and listen-in as we review the ad that Sir John had to pitch to Levis three times before they bought the idea.

What did he pitch them?

He pitched them Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road but with added old man trousers with really good creases.

What did they get?

They got a fucked up Chevy Chevelle, a slightly overweight Highway Patrol man, the director’s best mate and Flat Eric. The only glove puppet ever to be interviewed for Face magazine.

In the year that Rod Hull fell off his roof trying to fix his TV aerial, find out how the world’s breakout pop culture star was another, slightly smaller, animal with a bloke’s hand up its arse.

See the ad for yourself on our Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSa4r3IYZlM and please do get in touch at [email protected] if you have questions or you’d like to suggest an ad for us to review.

In the meantime, subscribe, give us a like, look for us on Twitter and be kind to one another.

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We're mixing things up a bit this week and in partnership with our sister-pod looking at an ad that's actually running in the UK today and asking is it worth A Short Walk and a Handshake?

John Lewis Christmas ads were ‘event’ advertising when things like that mattered. Now the world’s fucked do we care and are advertising agencies and their department store clients really best placed to raise national morale?

If this ad tells us anything it's that there’s a corner of the internet that's really disappointed there's no 222 to Tooting, pigeons are really ugly birds and attempting to fix a pair of specs with the label off an apple is futile. FUTILE I TELL YOU!

Listen with kindness in your heart and watch the ad at…https://youtu.be/x_3zBeQZKbg

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A society under the microscope, the unmasking of a perfectly British perversion…we think it’s fair to say that this is our most gripping episode to date.

Join us as we review an ad for a fizzy drink that doesn’t feature a comedian, an American jazz singer, an ex-professional footballer and an overweight orange bloke.

Instead, prepare to be seduced by a commercial so compelling that Tony loses control of his bowels after discussing its role in post-modern British advertising.

A beautiful, heart-breaking, absolutely barking piece of work that will demonstrate the power of fizzy drink passion, as a man in a homemade gimp suit is reunited with the love of his life after his wife pops out to run some messages.

In the year that Ivy Tilsley’s face melted, your inhibitions will melt away too as we review an ad for Apple Tango that first aired in 1994.

Here's a link to the ad that we don't actually review but talk about (a lot)...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqVFnxHWnlc

And here's the link to the ad that we do review (and talk about a lot)... https://youtu.be/yuS0VsB74No

Get in touch if you’d like to suggest an ad for us to review and keep being kind to one another.

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Classic Ads From Simpler Times prides itself on being of the people for the people so this week we’ve got a working-class-austerity vibe going as we look at a TV ad from 1982 for a product that looks like steak, cooks like steak but isn’t steak. Really. It’s not steak. It's so much less than steak.

Join us as Tony waxes lyrical about the mark 2 Ford Transit, Margaret Thatcher starts a small war, Steve explains how his family was poor but unhappy and we review a Birds Eye ad for steakhouse grills.

In a commercial where the stakes are high and the steaks are made of lamb, Birds Eye keeps the Advertising Standards Authority off its back by mentioning chips eleven times so that everyone think it’s a Mcains ad. For chips. Not steak. Made of lamb. Nothing to see here.

Treat yourself. You're going to love it.

See the ad for yourself on our Youtube channel at https://youtu.be/beXtsqhwj70 and get in touch if you’d like to suggest an ad for us to review.

In the meantime remember…be kind to one another, subscribe and leave us a review if you can be arsed.

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This week the cut-price time machine that is Classic Ads From SImpler Times lands us back in 2010 from where we launch into a review that encompasses feminist theory in Australian politics, a Nazi sympathiser who wrote the Big Mac of classical music and the removal of Jack Duckworth from Coronation Street as part of David Cameron’s culture wars on the north.

Join us as fourth-rate advertising industry suit Steve Cooke and first-rate advertising creative director and TV commercial director Tony Williams (no – not that one, the other one) review The Man Your Man Could Be, a TV ad for Old Spice.

Women want him. Men want to smell like him. He's the man your man could smell like if he didn't use lady-scented body wash...it won at Cannes but did it win our hearts as it that launched one of the most spectacularly successful rebrands in recent advertising history?

See the ad for yourself on our Youtube channel at https://youtu.be/LQjDCD2n0MY

Get in touch if you’d like to suggest an ad for us to review and in the meantime remember…be kind to one another.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.