Re:“Just let some joy smoke sift into your system”
by eropple on Saturday January 14, 2017 @04:48PM
(#13400756)
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.
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.