Outdated Advertising

This outrageous collection of inappropriate ads will have you turning the pages and shaking your head in disbelief.

Outdated Advertising: Memories from a Less-than-PC Era takes a look at print advertising from the mid-1850s through the 1980s with an eye toward ads that were notorious for their sexist, racist, politically-incorrect, or other wildly inappropriate content—or for just plain bad taste. Among the dozens of full-color examples, readers will find:

a woman being spanked by her husband for not buying the right coffee

the story of a mother having to turn her child over to an orphanage because her late husband didn’t keep up his life insurance payments

Aunt Jemima declaring “Happy days is here!” because of her new pancake recipe

doctors promoting particular brands of cigarettes

the Michael Jackson Rainbow Brite portable record player with the copy line, “Gifts to keep children singing.”

Advertising has changed over the decades—that is a major understatement. Despite the nostalgia of such shows as Mad Men, the outrageous images in Outdated Advertising show readers just how far we’ve come since then.

Michael Lewis is a twenty-year veteran of the book publishing business, having acquired and edited hundreds of books. He is also the author or coauthor of a dozen books, including The 100 Best Beatles Songs (with Steve Spignesi) and A Guy Walks into a Bar. He lives in northern New Jersey.

Stephen Spignesi is a bestselling author of more than sixty titles, including books about Stephen King, the Beatles, American and world history, the Titanic, George Washington and the American Presidents, the Founding Fathers, John F. Kennedy, Jr., world disasters, Robin Williams, and Woody Allen. His novel Dialogues was hailed as a “reinvention of the psychological thriller.”

Ben B. Judd, Jr., Ph.D., is the former Chair of the University of New Haven Department of Marketing and International Business, and the Associate Dean of the University of New Haven School of Business. He has written extensively on advertising, and his work has appeared in places ranging from Journal of Advertising Research to Psychology magazine.

"Page after page, you will find yourself asking "how could they print THAT?" They say hindsight is 20/20, but sometimes it is also amusing, ironic, interesting, and even disgraceful. Our ever-changing social standards of what is appropriate in media could fill a book—this book."—Dr. Brian King, comedian and psychologist