It’s not just old photographs and newspaper stories that tell the story of how we lived. Often the advertisements in between can also remind us of how much society has changed.
On the 40-year-old pages of local papers are some smug-looking children drawn in comic-like form and smirking at a head lice medicine called “DDT Emulsion”, which promises to kill “the tiny creatures.” So what if DDT, a powerful insecticide, was virtually banned worldwide for agricultural use in the 1960s over fears that it was destroying the environment?
Filling half of another page, the advertising men are trying to persuade the reader that a new fridge proves that “beauty is not just skin deep.” The Kelvinator stands formidably next to an overdressed woman who is embracing the fridge tenderly.
Then there is the more artistic approach with a touch of landscape.
Parked in the middle of a desert, a scantily clad woman leans against a television set incongruously perched on the bonnet of a Lancer car. Buyers are promised that this is what they will get by buying the car … the television, that is. This was an age when almost anything could be advertised in the newspaper.
A “ditch witch” heavy duty construction machine that does anything from digging to cutting to ploughing shares space with a model wearing Max Factor make-up that stays on while you “shower or swim”. What was acceptable in a UAE in 1974 looks strange and sometimes inappropriate in 2014.
Persuading customers to part with their dirhams 40 years ago reflected an era of marketing that today seems sexist, less conservative and with much looser standards.
“I really loved the old ads. They were somehow more honest in their directness and less confusing than today’s ads,” says Ahmed Al Ali, 72, an Emirati retired engineer from Abu Dhabi who has always read a newspaper with his morning qahwa.
Original article by Rym Ghazal
Continue reading at The National:
UAE advertisements of old highlight a different way of doing business
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