The funny thing about advertising in the 1980’s

The funny thing about advertising in the 1980’s.

It was a time of excess, of big hair and shoulders, marble-washed jeans and corporations ridiculing taking a lunch break. It was also the decade during which gaming became a THING.

I spent many an hour playing games such as Match Day 2, Dun Darach, Sabre Wulf and Batman. The programmers of the time were Ocean, US Gold and Ultimate. While the graphics on my tiny 48k Spectrum + were good, they did not quite match the image being displayed in the advertising.

Take the old Spectrum 48k games, they were sadly restricted by the tech at the time, and imagination was key when playing these games as the artwork on the front cover indicated something closer to the more superior graphics of an arcade machine. Of course, this was not a problem, but when you look at the cover for Match Day 2 compared to game graphics, there is no comparison.

It is worth remembering that the army of coders and designers worked wonders with the tech they had; in a short space of time the quality of games available for a Spectrum 48k increased greatly. We went, in just a couple of years, from the basic of Frogger to the 3D wonder of Batman. Glorious.

The 1980’s were a remarkable time to be a man; Gillette regularly informed us how wonderful and tough men were and how women fawned at their very presence. (This is not something I have experienced, hence my preference for Wilkinson Sword razors.)

We had the surfing muscle from Old Spice and the dark mystery of Brut 33, together with the man in black from Milk Tray. There was a lot of machismo and power during the Eighties; you saw this at the movies (Commando, Rambo), and you saw this in the music (power ballads, big rock hair), this was also notable in the ads.

Here is wannabe Bond of the time Pierce Brosnan displaying a great sense of sexual allure and desire for his favourite tipple:

So the 80’s were all about power?

Yes, perhaps they were. It was machismo, greed, experimentation, paranoia, rebellion, enthusiasm, fear, sex, need, tension and crazy humour all fused into one fireball of a decade.

That is what advertising is. It is creating drama and characters and making you emotionally want that thing which you are looking at, it is giving you an idea that your life will be so much better, and asking how could you have survived without it? You see that driving through the movie posters, magazine ads, computer game covers and then VHS covers. The artwork and image was usually way more dramatic than the actual experience.

The 80’s may not have been completely PC but just think back to the iconic images of the time: the movie posters that enticed you; the advertising campaigns. Many of the tropes designed in that time are still being used today. The music, the movies, the vision and the imagination were all alive. It gave us the New Romantics and a sense of powerful individualism. We need that again more than ever - 

We should celebrate individuality, not be fearful of it.