Advertising in the 1980s

In surveying the advertising of the 1980s, it may be useful to begin with examples in which the social undertones are most distinct. Some of the most memorable ad campaigns of the decade were devised for political campaigns, and the 1980s were also a time when advertising came into its own as the primary medium of campaigning. As older party and political structures declined, advertising became central to campaigns by the 1980s, and the decade saw two particularly effective campaigns, both by Republicans; one positive and one negative.

The positive campaign, for the 1984 Reagan re-election campaign, had the theme "Morning in America." The specific images were forgettable enough--family picnics and the like, shot in a soft-focus flavor if not literally with soft focus, but the campaign achieved its enormous effectiveness from its background. The decade of the 1970s had been a dismal one for the United States, beginning with the Vietnam War and civil disorder, and ending wi

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a domestic company. It was an ad for a Japanese company featuring Joe Isuzu, the pitchman who was spoofed in the ad as a shameless, transparent liar. The Joe Isuzu campaign offered an anti-ad, playing off the pervasive suspicion of car ads in general as dishonest. This surely accounts for its memorability, after other car ads of the time have faded into a haze. The intent of the ad was also, perhaps, to play obliquely off the general good reputation of Japanese cars. It is difficult to imagine that a domestic firm would have dared to imply, even in jest, that its claims were dishonest; such an implication was itself all too believable. Even for Isuzu the campaign may have been too clever by half; as memorable as Joe Isuzu himself was, the ads evidently provided no lasting boost in sales, and the Isuzu brand name has itself vanished from the American automotive scene ("Overrated and Underrated," 1998). Automobiles are the heavy-industry products most often sold directly to consumers, but other firms in the industrial sector also faced the challenge of a public perception of American industrial slippage. A curiously anachronistic example is a General Electric ad that was still running on CNN as late as 1998, but which b
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Approximate Word count = 2246
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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