Interpretations of Marketing Strategies: The Evolution of Advertising

Sego Diet Drink

From what I gather, Sego was a diet drink that was popular in the 1960’s. I’ve recently come across some of their ads, and being incredibly intrigued by the visual rhetoric of it all, I knew I just had to share some of these ads with all of you:

http://graphic-design.tjs-labs.com/thumbs/sego-time-10-04-1963-030-thumb.jpg

Seriously? Seriously?! As with most advertisements like this, I don’t know whether to laugh or be morally outraged. In the text next to the image, it says, “Wouldn’t you like to look 10 lbs younger? Try SEGO… for success!” The assumption here is that when you’re thinner, you look younger (an apparently incorrect assumption, as we all learned at The Great Fitness Experiment– Charlotte discovered studies that suggest the thinner we are, the older we look!). And then we’ve also got the notion that women aren’t successful unless they are “beautiful” (again, a shout-out to one of Charlotte’s posts in which we discussed this same issue)- taking into account whatever your definition of “beauty” is.

And this is very clearly directed towards women (specifically the heterosexual middle class). After all, we’ve got to please T/the Man in our life, both corporate figures and the spouses! And clearly they will not be pleased unless we’re as thin as we were on the honeymoon. Assuming we had these teensy little waists at that point.

http://gono.com/museum2003/museum%20collect%20info/sego/s1.jpg

And don’t forget that swimsuit season is almost upon us, ladies. Is there any better way to scream “YOU’RE INADEQUATE!” than on a nice big advertisement while chucking diet drinks at us?

http://gono.com/museum2003/museum%20collect%20info/sego/s7.jpg

…and now we get to the point where we’re blaming those spouses that we’re trying so hard for. But I think he might actually be saying “eat some real food already! You can even scrape off this excessive amount of whipped cream if you don’t want to eat that as well. Can’t have you passing out from not getting enough sustenance!”, rather than “mmm, rich chocolaty cake heaped with cream, eat it because I’m evil and trying to sabotage your efforts to get healthy”, like the advertisement suggests.

None of these advertisements are current. I don’t know what the reaction was to them at the time that they were circulating, but I imagine that the first one at least would raise a few eyebrows if it came out today. At the same time, are they really so different from the ads that we see today? Are they any more blatant than the blazing headlines (“Eat this, lose weight!”; “So long cellulite!”) on any popular magazine? We’re not talking about just women’s magazines, either- “Scrawny to Brawny in Just 8 Weeks!” was on the cover of one Men’s Health mag. I can’t comment on what men’s magazines were like in the 1960’s because I don’t know, but maybe that is all that has changed: there’s not just pressure on women to conform to a specific “look” anymore, because now men are being pressured as well to fit a certain image in today’s society.

What are your thoughts on all of this? Have you heard of Sego or seen similar ads? Do you think much has changed over the years with the relationship between advertising and the way our bodies and body image are portrayed?

100 Burpees

It is fitness challenge time again for this chica! Specifically, the 100 Burpees Challenge, which I found out about through Cranky Fitness. The idea of this challenge is to do one burpee on Day One, two burpees on Day Two, and so on until you’ve been doing it for 100 days. Luckily, you can do the burpees throughout the day and they do not have to be completed all in a row. 100 consecutive push ups were difficult enough; I don’t think I could do that for burpees!

So what exactly is a burpee? We used to do them all the time in boot camp. They are killer: from a standing position, jump into the air, squat down on the ground and hop your feet back into a push up position, do a push up, hop back into the squatting position on the ground, and then jump up again. That’s one burpee. Exhausting? Brutal? Yes and yes. They also happen to be one of the best exercises for a total body workout.

I started this challenge on Monday. Here’s to Day Three of the Burpee Challenge! Anyone else feel like joining in? Remember, we ease our way into it with just one extra each time. It’s doable. It’s a challenge. You know you want in 😉