THEY AD TO BE KIDDING!

Gasp! Did we REALLY think these were OK? Shockingly, yes... as ad guru’s new book reveals

THE hit TV drama Mad Men made a stylish and convincing case for a golden era of advertising in New York in the 1950s and 1960s.

The show depicted a booming postwar America awash with consumer goods and a creative and ruthless team of advertising executives, under agency boss Don Draper, charged with selling them to a newly wealthy US public.

But what of the campaigns that Draper’s real-life Madison Avenue counterparts dreamed up between three-martini lunches and steamy office affairs? Were they as worldly and sophisticated as the polished world of Mad Men might suggest?

I became intrigued after discovering real-life adverts from the era that were in bewilderingly poor taste. So I set myself the grimly amusing task of collecting as many examples of them as possible.

They show that marketing men – and they were mostly men – in the middle of the last century had few qualms about creating brutally sexist and racist adverts that would never see the light of day today and which most of us now would find offensive to the point of callousness.

But back then, the advertising men would brush off any criticism of being misogynistic, wryly explaining that misogynists are men who don’t hate women as much as women hate each other. And while slavery had long been abolished and civilrights campaigners were pricking the public consciousness, deeply racist advertising was considered acceptable in America’s boardrooms and their advertising agencies, as long as it was deemed to be lighthearted and folksy.

Looking at the ads today, nothing about them could be described as fondly jocular. Quite the reverse.

Although many of the advertisements I’ve selected are grotesque and alarming, they present an important portrait of American society of the Mad Men era and, thankfully, demonstrate that we have taken many steps forward.

© Charles Saatchi, 2015 Beyond Belief: Racist, Sexist, Crude And Dishonest: The Golden Age Of Madison Avenue, by Charles Saatchi, is published by Booth-Clibborn Editions at £25. Get your copy for £18.75 with free p&p until November 22 at www.mailbookshop.co.uk.

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