50th: Fun with Advertisements — Sex, Stars and Cartoons Sell

AS ADVERTISEMENTS go, so goes our magazine. Or any magazine. While smug in our self-assuredness that the church of editorial content remains unfettered and separated from the state of advertising, the truth is we need each other. Without advertising, a publication would explode on the launch pad, never seeing the light of print. Without editorial, advertising would produce merely a shoppers’ news, a penny saver.

Over the past 50 years, we’ve had our share of the rigid and mundane when it comes to ad presentation, but there are plenty of examples where advertisers have gone out of their way to trigger response mechanisms. Pretty women have long adorned ads, though in recent years that trend has almost disappeared. Actors have been contracted to help promote printing equipment and consumables, though not all that frequently. (Gans Ink founder Bob Gans used close friend and ’60s sex bombshell Jayne Mansfield to peddle ink in print ads.) But, for the most part, marketers and their agencies have relied on their creative juices to produce attention-getting copy and graphics to generate the most effective advertisements.

What follows is a sample platter depicting some amusing ads that ran in the publication during different eras. We hope you enjoy this walk down memory lane.