Advertising In The 1980's

In the 1980’s, advertising transitioned from simple marketing techniques to technology driven advertisements. With the rise of new technologies, such as modern television sets that had cable TV, the 1980’s became one of the most interesting times for advertisements and marketing. Having this new modern technology really shaped how companies could reach a wider audience with their products and potentially sell to more people. Quickly, let’s have a refresher on what advertising means. Advertising is, “the act or practice of calling public attention to one’s product, service, need, etc., especially by paid announcements in newspapers and magazines, over radio or television, on billboards, etc.,” (“Advertising.” Dictionary.com). Advertisers

The FTC conducted tests on their so-called claim, “Tested and Approved”, and those claims turned out to be false. It also turned out that other companies with this same seal of approval turned out to be just as false and were guilty of these deceptive practices. The FTC took them to court, resulting in all of these companies having to change their seal of approval and add it with, “Or Refund Guarantee”. However, in the beginning of 1980, congress passed the “FTC Improvement Act” which did not allow the FTC to engage in any rulemaking to regulate any type of advertising as an unfair act or practice. What this means is that the FTC could still file certain accounts against any business or company that may be falsely advertising a product. However, it would be done in more of an effective and equitable way, enforcing the laws that were in place for the FTC. With the FTC not as powerful, advertisers and companies would flourish and take advantage of the

An infomercial is a television program that promotes a product in an informative and supposedly objective way (Infomercials). Essentially what these infomercials would do is advertise a certain product for about fifteen to thirty seconds of air time. Some of the most famous infomercials of the 1980’s included, Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial and “Where’s the Beef Lady from Wendy’s. Apple’s 1984 commercial showed a woman with a sledgehammer breaking a screen displaying consumers being brain washed. This commercial was so widely popular because no company in advertising had ever done this before. It showed that people need to break out of the norm and buy products that are not just average. Apple did that quite well with the introduction of their new line of Apple computers. These are some of the reasons why advertising in the 1980’s was much different than anything prior to it. With the rise of advertising in the 1980’s, one place advertisements thrived was the food advertising and marketing campaigns of different fast food chains. Food advertising increased 86% from the beginning of the 1980’s to the 1990’s. In the beginning of the 1980’s, the food industry was booming with all sorts of advertisements, from TV commercials and billboards, to flyers. During that ten-year period, media for food advertising increased 230%, which is equivalent to increasing from $2.3