Word: productive
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reasons advertising from the 1980s--or even the 1940s--generally looks so laughable is that it is predicated on entirely different assumptions. Back then, the advertising had something to do with the product. It noted that you could buy Post Grape Nuts or Freestone Deluxe tires, told you how much you would expect to pay for them, and told you why these particular grape nuts or tires were objectively superior to other kinds of grape nuts or tires...
...this was, of course, before the age when advertising began to hinge on what kind of person you would be if you used the product. You remember from the '60s those giddily idealistic United Nations-style Coca Cola ads, with 100 different races of people drinking frosty bottles of Coke and singing "I'd like to Teach the World to Sing in Perfect Harmony." Looking up from' Mission Impossible,' you felt that the next time you slugged down a pop, you would be joining hands with the oppressed people of the world...
Back then, of course, the people were still drinking Coca-Cola. The product had something do with...
Since the '60s, that trend of advertising to tell you how you will feel it you buy the corporation's product and how it will change your wearying existence--has accelerated And by the 1980s, it has reached its extreme. It's gone farther, really, than just ads for shaving which are really ads for a Club Med style in the morning...
...short, we have entered the cra of non-material materialism. What's for sale is not the action, but the reaction: not the goods, but the good felling: not the product, but what it produces in you. Insofar as there is something for sale, it doesn't matter how much it costs or whether it's better than others of its kind. In fact, it the product doesn't even have to be shown in the advertisement. All that matters is the mood, the intangible, the emotion...