#CiC – adverts and taxonomies

One of the most exciting events taking place at Cradled in Caricature is a workshop entitled 'Create Your Own 1920s Advert'. This is to be led be two postgraduates from the School of History – Michael Kliegl and Rebecca Farmer – and will explore aesthetic, psychology and advertising in order to understand how and why advertisements are so wedded to stereotypes of character. After dividing into groups participants will be asked to make their own advertisements, and (here is the really fun bit) will be offered big pens, jumbo stick notes and boards in order to make them.

Despite there being a clear intellectual rationale behind this workshop focusing on cigarette advertising in the 1920s (see abstract here), we felt that spreading posters containing the Marlboro man around campus may have attracted some negative attention from the powers that be at the University of Kent. We therefore had to find an alternative advertising campaign that was both well known internationally and clearly associated the product in question with making people a 'better' man/woman. After some thought, the only campaign we could think of was what you see below. As Terry Norton says on Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge “people will always want to look at lovely ladies”...

Cradled in Caricature will take place on Monday 20 June, at Woolf College, University of Kent, Canterbury.
The full programme can be found here.
For inquiries or further information please contact me at cradledincaricature@gmail.com or twitter.com/cincaricature.