Home History Get That Ten High Smile and Other Vintage Ads That Seem a...

Get That Ten High Smile and Other Vintage Ads That Seem a Little . . . Off.

And by “mix” we mean, “Does it fuck the lime?”
And seriously, if you don’t want to smell or taste the gin in your cocktail, there’s this thing called vodka.

Even the ad seems skeptical.
His grimace-wink seems to say, “Yeah, this probably isn’t going to go very well, but hey, we gotta drink the whole bottle to find out, amiright?”

Or else what? Wait a minute—is this a Scotch intervention?
This is a prime example of a mean-sell ad, where everyone involved seems unhappy or even hostile. The sort of faces you’d expect to see at a grim, last-ditch intervention, not during an appeal to try an allegedly superior Scotch.

In case you halfwits didn’t grasp the super-clever inference of our earlier ads.
This ad followed on the heels of a print campaign that didn’t bother with an explainer panel (see right). So, to sum it up:

“If you can find a better bourbon … buy it!”
“Okay, I will.”
“No, you idiot, we’re saying there is no better bourbon!”
“Than Ancient Age? Are you fucking kidding me?”

This is the ad equivalent of a comedian stopping to explain the dopey punchline of a lame joke no one laughed at.

That’s right, chumps! Give your friends a bottle of our bottom-shelf hooch and they might just buy you a goddamn boat!
It’s all supposed to be in jest, sure, but I find it hard to wrap my heart around the amount of customer-contempt needed to even suggest the possibility. The most astonishing thing of all is how Calvert manages to be “the choicest you can drink or serve” while employing 65% grain neutral spirits. Maybe ”choicest” doesn’t mean what we think it means.

That lovable scamp! He has once again dumped all our food on the floor to rot! Ha ha!
Hey, this was the 1950s. Guys indulged in this kind of beer hoardery all the time. Just guys being guys. No need to summon one of those fancy shrinks.

They do if you can make those goddamn typewriters shut the hell up.
Finally, industrial science comes through with something useful: a hangover-proof typewriter. Ah, that golden age when we drunkards ruled the Earth.

When art directors drop acid.
“No, I’m serious. I want some fucking flowers sort of ballet dancing above, you know, some kind of infinite plane of multihued light streams. Plus some weird globulous shapes just randomly floating around. And for the love of God, don’t show those uptight squares at Brown-Forman the proofs. Just run the bastard.”

I wonder why they aren’t showing her face.
You’ll never convince me the ad agency didn’t understand the subtle menace they were loading into this ad.

eo.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Satan!
And he’s brought some booze! Honestly, which agency was handling Johnnie’s print ads in the 1960s? Lew+Cipher?

Our beer is so excellent that even our child slave laborers are hogging it down.
A lot of posters from the Belle Epoche featured children joyously drinking beer, wine, liqueurs—even hard liquor. The posters weren’t pitching to children so much as suggesting their product was so pure and delicious that even a child’s delicate palette would find it appealing.

Oh, I think we can figure it out.
One for Ed, eleven for me. Holiday problems solved!

Yeeeeeaaaaaah.
Ah yes, that fine Ten High Smile. While I salute his Ten High-enhanced enthusiasm, I wonder if they could have found a more attractive spokeswino than this chap. Maybe the ad men figured, perhaps after tasting it, that only a certain type of person would drink Ten High, and that person might well take advice from a wild-eyed, bowtied super wino.