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Tag: Americana

  • Old School Cigarette Ad: These Smokes Are Born Gentle, Just Like Your Newborn

    Unless you’re a crappy son/daughter/husband, you know that yesterday was Mother’s Day. The annual holiday allows us to honor the most important person in our young lives, and the first woman we ever truly loved, our mommas. It’s also a day for lucky children to thank the stars that their mothers didn’t screw them up – I mean, things were a lot different back in the 50s, 60s, and even the 70s and 80s.

    Case in point, this vintage ad touting the “gentleness” of some new cigarette packaging. “Proud mothers, please forgive us if we too feel something of the pride of a new parent,” it says. “For new Philip Morris, today’s Philip Morris, is delighting smokers everywhere. Enjoy the gentle pleasure, the fresh unfiltered flavor, of this new cigarette, born gentle, then refined to special gentleness in the making.”

    You know, because this new cig is born gentle and fresh, just like our new baby. And it’s totally cool to smoke around your baby, but also hold him oh so very tight to your smoke-filled clothes. Mmmmm….fresh:

    (image)

    As you can see, this ad ran in a 1956 edition of the Saturday Evening Post – an relic from a much different time. We’ve all seen Betty Draper puffing away both with and around child on Mad Men, but sometimes it’s hard for people my age to truly understand what motherhood was like 50 or 60 years ago. This vintage add perfectly captures one of the true oddities of past Americana – willful ignorance, questionable science, and manipulative advertising. None of those things are gone from today’s marketing landscape, but the consumer has evolved.

    A little.

    [via BoingBoing]

  • American Cities According to Twitter

    Have you ever wondered what United States cities would actually be called if they let the internet name them? By analyzing tweets, Inbox Q has given us the answer. Did you know that Twitter users commonly refer to Milwaukee, Wisconsin as “Milwacky?” Nope, I didn’t either.

    Inbox Q is a service that crawls Twitter for questions about specific companies or brands and streams them for the people who should be concerned with questions, say a customer service department, or a marketing department. They say that they started Inbox Q because they “realized that there were lots of questions being asked by people on Twitter but most weren’t receiving very useful answers. In fact, most questions go completely unanswered on Twitter.”

    They sorted through millions of tweets and discovered that only about two-thirds of those tweeters used the proper place name to describe where they were. They then compiled this fun little infographic to show the odd names that Twitter users give large American cities.

    Nicknames like “Gotham” for New York and “Nawlins” for New Orleans aren’t anything new. In fact, I was pretty sure once that New Orleans was actually “Nawlins.” But some of the nicknames the Twitter users give our cities are strange to say the least. “Shark City,” “El Chuco” and “Miami of Canada” are new ones to me.

    It thrills my heart that Twitter users call San Diego “Whale’s Vagina,” a reference of course to this scene in Anchorman –

    If they would have mapped my city of Lexington I’m sure it would have been “Horse Capital of the World” or “Lex-Vegas.” Check out the infographic below to see if your city has a wacky Twitter name.

    America According to Twitter
    InboxQ – Answer Questions on Twitter