Attempted Bloggery: color TV

Showing posts with label color TV. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 4, 2019

Claude Smith: A Captive Audience

A 1955 print advertisement for advertising agency Young & Rubicam humorously illustrates the concept of a captive television audience. TV was a new medium but the advertising industry was working hard to assure clients of the crucial importance of having compelling commercials. The amusing ad is unsigned but on stylistic grounds it can reliably be attributed to cartoonist Claude Smith.

The only captive audience
that counts is the one that's
captured by the sheer excellence
of your commercials.
Claude Smith
Young & Rubicam advertisement
1955

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1955-Young-Rubicam-Captive-Audience-Vintage-Print-Ad/273787420072?hash=item3fbf007da8:g:Yo0AAOSw-ZRcoWC9

For the sake of comparison, here from the blog archives is a television-themed New Yorker cartoon by Claude Smith who, when he does sign his name, signs simply Claude.

"We had color, but it kept clashing with the room."
Claude Smith
The New Yorker, April 21, 1956, page 32

https://attemptedbloggery.blogspot.com/2017/05/claude-in-color.html?utm_content=buffer413f3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Note: By all means leave a comment if you disagree with my attribution of this drawing to Claude Smith. Also drop a line if you know the publication and date in which this ad appeared.

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Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Claude in Color

Color television was still a novelty in 1956 when "The Perry Como Show" became the first live nationally-broadcast program to adopt color for a majority of its episodes. Even if your family had a color television set then, almost all of the programming you could watch would have been in black-and-white. Nevertheless, color TV was a talked-about new technology and the most talked-about new technology has a way of getting talked about in New Yorker cartoons.

Claude Smith's cartoon in the April 21, 1956 issue shows how strongly people were drawn to television for their entertainment. Here two well-dressed couples pair off with the men in front and the women in back to enjoy a broadcast with a dancing chorus line. Watching TV is already an upscale social activity in America. Smoking is already an upscale social activity for women. Probably no one in 1956 got rid of their color television set and went back to black-and-white, but that's the premise of the gag.