Surely 1978 can’t have been that long ago…
Elisa Bowman rescued a 22 May 1978 copy of New Zealand Woman’s Weekly from the recycling, along with a swag bag of other gems (watch this space). This advertisement for the ‘Slackliner’ on page 79 in particular caught our jaundiced eye. Clearly, that’s the popular David Walliams from Little Britain on the left, but we’re not sure about his mate, urgently studying the job vacancies in the Herald. Even the women in North Wales in 1978 looked more alluring than these oddly attired creatures. Were there really no decent-looking models to be had in New Zealand at the time? The branding needed some attention, too. One could hike-up a Slackliner under everything, the ad copy tells us — including, presumably one’s slacks — but the question on women’s lips must surely have been, “Do they look any less revolting in ‘buff’?” If this was the Victoria’s Secret of its day, Kiwi men probably wished that the news had never been let out. Indeed, some of them appear still to be traumatised by this 28-year-old campaign. Perhaps it was confusion over the use of the word ‘slack’ in the product name that resulted in such an ill-fated photo shoot, and which caused the photographer to focus on the saggy wrinkles above the posterior of the model on the right; rather than, for example, the dead dog on the deck in the background. Way back in 1978, $4.99 seems a high price to pay to end up looking like eight pounds of shite in a six-pound bag, but at least the Slackliner was made in New Zealand. If our readers have scans of any other advertising gems from the heyday of the NZBC, why not email them to us here.
posted by Chris Bell at 11:13 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home