Advertising & Packaging

Because there is so much choice of material, there are specialist collectors for all sorts of advertisements from engraved 1700s trade cards to pottery Guinness toucans, labels, posters, large enamelled metal street 'puffs' as they became known in the 1800s, and shop signs such as barbers' poles and opticians' spectacles. There are calendars, bookmarks and paperweights, clothes hangers, shoe trees, thermometers, ashtrays, biscuit tins, bar furnishings and beer mats, and among the first attempts to sell through attractive packaging was the pot lid.

Advertising Or Legalised Lies

It is a long-established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. H.G. Wells made the famous statement that “advertising is a legalized form of lying”. While many people argue that advertisers exploit the emotions of people, nothing could be further from the truth.

Adverts, Brands, Packaging & Puffs

Advertising is as old as barter and the marketplace itself, and almost anything can and has been used as an advertisement. When it survives, the mass-produced and supposedly ephemeral object can become rare and prized.

Ceramic Pot Lids & Advertising

Potlids are one of the earliest forms of visual advertising that first appeared in the 1830s and continued until the 1910s. All types of consumer products, from toothpaste to meat paste and the amusing ‘bear’s grease’, (a healthy hair pomade, somewhat like hair gel), were packaged in small ceramic pots with lids. The lids were decorated with appealing images that, it was hoped, would help them sell more of their product. The same theory is still practised today by the advertising industry.

Enamel Signs

Before the advent of giant hoardings and huge printed posters, roadside advertising was much more restrained. There is a song about the demise of corner shops which includes one verse:

On the walls enamel signs,

names of old to see.

Yorkshire Relish, thick or thin,

and Mazawattee tea.

Hudson´s soap, Robin starch,

bags of Reckitt´s Blue,

Sylvan Flakes and Oxydol,

and Nugget boot polish too.

Michelin Man

The Michelin tyre company created a mascot that has served as the textbook example of how to achieve corporate identity on a global scale.

As the Michelin Man became known, Bibendum has been with us for almost as long as the automobile itself.