In 1919, I guess, a person didn't have much to read from. They could probably read a newspaper from back to back while having breakfast. They didn't have a radio or television. They didn't have smartphones. They didn't have a lot of books at home either, I presume.

So it would make sense for advertisers to fill their precious page with words, because someone's going to read that.

On the other hand we're practically swimming in words these days. At any point I could touch a button or screen and receive more text than I could possibly read in an hour. Learning when to stop reading is very much an essential part of today's life. ("Ain't nobody got time for that", which is actually a surprisingly insightful statement.)

Just my two cents.

It seems like back then people were less saturated with media and seemed to trust and accept what they were told a lot more than today. Just consider old public service announcements - we would balk at being told what to do and how to live our lives. So maybe those long advertisements worked - even if you didn't read all of it, the text was there, surely containing all kinds of proof and reason.

Right now we are experiencing another massive loss of trust in the media in general, and we seem to trust advertised products only if they're presented by the people we already explicitly follow on social media - maybe future generations will wonder how a single image, unattached to our 'relationships' could ever have worked?

Definitely new. It's something I've watched in my lifetime - ad copy getting shorter and shorter, and the reading age dropping further and further.

I think the copy in this ad is super-effective. It honestly made me feel like rushing out and buying some of the product - even though I've never smoked, and never will.

My normal reaction to ads is somewhere between outraged irritation and utter indifference, so that's quite a result.

I think we lost that literary slant some time in the 1980s. I used to value the language in pre-70s science fiction, precisely because it was written like this. Alfred Bester and RA Lafferty did beautiful things with English, and I think Bester was a former ad man - so that explains that.

After Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Alien, science fiction became a lot more visual - even written science fiction, which suddenly became more about images (often stock images) than the power of words.

I wonder how much of it is the primacy of an American audience over a more British one, at least for English media; while American advertisements in the fifties and sixties weren't these wordless demands that you worship their #brand, they were generally shorter and more terse--which coincides with a very big boost in American consumer power and more of a push to appeal to the American audience. I believe it was Stephen King who noted that a British advertising man with a proper education could make copy for ribbed condoms read like the Magna goddamn Carta (his words, not mine).

Personally, I just like reading. (Which is probably also why I like writing.) So stuff like this is interesting from the perspective of just how to put things together to come up with neat strings of metaphors and interesting thoughts. So getting to watch people who are really, really good at their craft come out to play is rad.

Good thoughts, and I think it's "both", but don't make the mistake of assuming every era gets to choose freely whatever medium it wants to use. This might be at least partly a story of technologies. For example it's possible that in the 1920s they would've loved to use more images, if cameras were easier to get, and easier to use, and photographs were easier to print. (And anyplace I use "easier," feel free to substitute "cheaper.")

Yep, this is almost certainly part of it; but I'm not sure technological determinism tells the entire story. Consider that in the latter half of the 19th century, for instance, the American magazine market was driven by titles that used new technologies like daguerrotypy and then photography to present big, striking images -- titles like the National Police Gazette (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Police_Gazette), Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Leslie's_Illustrated_New...), and Godey's Lady's Book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godey%27s_Lady%27s_Book).

The advertising and poster art of the same period, though, is much more text-oriented. Look at Wikimedia's collections of ads from the 1870s (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:1870_advertiseme...) and 1880s (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:1880s_advertisem...) and you'll see what I mean -- though if you go through them chronologically you can also see them getting simpler and more streamlined as time goes on, so it was definitely a field in transition.

I wonder how much of the lag is just because of the way advertising as a business works. No ad, after all, gets run unless it first gets approved by a client; and the clients are usually more conservative and risk-averse than their ad-makers are. So advertising's slowness in following the culture could just come down to the fact that a campaign has to appeal to the sensibilities of stodgy old business dudes if the public is ever going to see it at all.

It's always seemed a little ironic to me that literacy rates have been on the rise at the same time that human communication in general appears to be moving away from the written form (UIs with indecipherable pictograms instead of text, ads, the whole "tl;dr" culture, etc.)

I think a lot of these are phrases that had emotional impact at the time. For example, these phrases:

   >Just between ourselves....
   >Well, sir, you'll be so all-fired happy
   >Say, you'll have a streak of []luck
   >Right now while the going's good

These would be like the equivalent in our time of phrases like,

    >You won't believe what happens next...
    >These ten things will.....
    >This one trick discovered by a mom.....

Some of those phrases really make you want to click, until they get overused and the public gets inured to them. Then they will be replaced by other phrases in the future. That is not the only skill the writer of this copy had, of course, but it's one of them.

They cover this transition in the documentary "The Century of the Self". I highly recommend it.

People change. And therefore, I suppose, so does the message.

Sounds like you'd enjoy the field of "media studies".

I have a bachelor's degree in communications, so I guess you could say that :-D

fascinating observation. I never noticed this until now...