RETROWURST: Globetrotting Gourmets (October 1972)

Time to show off this beautiful branded bit of marvellousness, given to me by an old chum as a memento of working on the British Airways account together. Although this dates back to the days of BOAC when British Airways was just a twinkle in someone's sky. 

The magnificent menu evokes the glory of international travel in the early 1970s. It's from 1972, when the Jumbo Jet (747) this lucky lot would have flown in was likely brand spanking new. The journey was London - Sydney, with 6 stops in between. Frankfurt - Beirut - Teheran - Bangkok - Hong Kong - Darwin. Almost 26 hours airborne. 

And I'd guess that you'd be unlikely to fit into your size 10 Pucci bikini on Bondi Beach if you took full advantage of the food and drink. 

Fresh Cornish lobster, Steak, pheasant & mushroom pie, Prawn Cocktail, Stuffed baby marrows, Seafood profiterole, Baked lobster thermidor, Breast of duckling with apple and prunes, washed down with Negronis, fine vintage wines selected from the great vineyards of Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Rhine, Cockburns Fine Old Tawny Port etcetera, etcetera.

I hope there were not too many cases of Mr Creosote.

The world and life have changed, of course. First Class passengers today skulk around slightly shamefacedly in sloppy designer leisurewear, trying not to think about the environment.

But if I could have a time machine, I could do worse than joining that flight half way round the world, gazing out at the endless sky, sipping a cool glass of champagne and nibbling on some vol-au-vents.

 

 

The (weirdly) beautiful game

The 2026/7 season has just kicked off, and here's a jolly marvellous ad from bookmaker Paddy Power to get us into the spirit. 

It sums up the weird and wonderful world of football fans. There's great casting, an idea, plenty of clever references to spot, attitude in spades - and the best tagline I've heard for a long time.

Why the football not?

Congratulations to brand and agency - BBH London.

I bet (ahem!) it's even got some of those sanctimonious types who'd never work on gambling or alcohol accounts thinking.

AUFSCHNITT 5: Functional Approach to Leadership Analysis (FALA) probably mid to late 70s

 

I’m resurrecting my Aufschnitt series, which I started back in 2019. The original idea was to immortalise cuttings I’d held onto, so I could chuck them out with a clear conscience.

So the two sausagey series are:

Retrowurst: my own scribblings, anything directly related to my own rather bedraggled career

Aufschnitt: cuttings and found bits and pieces from others

Today’s cold cut is an unusual one because it dates back before I entered the world of work. I was still at school. It’s from my dad’s bits and bobs - he was an RAF officer, in case you don’t know.

I guessed this was from late 60s to early 80s (from the typeface and what I know of my dad’s career). ChatGPT narrowed it down to 1973 - 1979, which seems plausible.

This was known as FALA and was used in officer training. I have to say that I like the approach and it’s not completely out of order for leadership training today. In fact, many commercial operations talk far more about “Leadership” these days than “Management.”

Looking at leadership on three overlapping areas - Task - Team - Individual - seems a pretty nifty way of doing things. The conciseness is great - all on a postcard, cutting down on bumf and BS in a very military manner.

But, to 21st century eyes, two things are very odd. 

“Discipline: Insisting on obedience, Punishing.” I wonder if this still appears in the military context.

And:

No mention of “mental health and well-being” in the “Personal (Problems)” section.

I think I’ll hang onto this one for the time being.

Ooohs, Ahs and Apple Juice

 

I listened in to a webinar from eat big fish and System1 last week on "The Startling Power of Surprise". Surprise and its use in the world of brands and their communications is something I've often posted about, for example here and here. 

The webinar - and my surprise posts - pick up some big (and maybe unsurprising) themes about surprise:

First of all, the pursuit of seamlessness and consistency (rather than coherence), the predictability inherent in algorithms, the requirement to be formulaic so that you can be found by AI, all leads to a rather unhappy dearth of surprise in our lives.

And then there’s getting the balance right - novelty and the familiar - as mastered by brands like IKEA with just the right mix of innovation and ritual.

And finally, there’s surprise and surprise. What about negative surprise? The word is usually prefixed by nasty/unwelcome/unpleasant in this case, but how do you judge that? Then there are those cognitive dissonance types of surprises where things are so off-kilter/not fitting to the brand where the brain simply switches off and ignores it.

And there’s there’s plain old shock-value, just for the sake of it.

What I found particularly interesting in the webinar was the dictinction between surprise as a little creative flourish/an executional twist ,and surprise as a strategic tool. Adam Morgan calls this the “Oh!” and the “Ohhhh!”.

The long “Ohhhh!” has more lasting effect on the memory - and can reframe the category in people’s minds, or change their relationship with the brand. 

I was surprised recently by the design work by the Stuttgart agency Papa Tom for wildling apple juice spritzer. Most German apple juice/applewein brands tend to use artisanal/homely/countryside/traditional imagery and design, which gets pretty samey, especially once AI is let loose on it. 

But wildling is surprising in its approach - which includes the nettles in the product itself - it looks a touch dangerous, edgy, mysterious. Not something for a kiddies’ birthday party.

Gets a definite “Ohhh!” from me.

   

 

Boy meets girl meet IRL

I've been blathering on about what I call the internot for over eight years on this (ahem!) internet blog.

Sometimes I think it's because I'm old and jaded and view the past through Anglo bubble-gum pink glasses. 

But more and more, I get the feeling it's not just me. From digital detox to anemoia (nostalgia for a time you never knew) to AI vegans, there's a tangible weariness about all things internet.

Boy meets girl meets IRL is a popular theme for ads these days. Here are just three I've seen in the last week:

In the latest duplo ad, boy tries to get girl's attention with various internot devices. Finally, a paper aeroplane made from a duplo wrapper does the trick. 

For the couple in the Dr. Oetker Ristorante ad, "It's a Match" on the first IRL date:

And then there's Deutsche Telekom & iPhone 17 with an ad called "Unique Together":

The message of this one is - the whizz-bang tech of the iPhone and the Telekom network is all fine and dandy - but in the end, nothing beats meeting up IRL in a coffee shop. 

If there's one thing that AI has taught us, it's that you can't fake having lived.

Two-Facebook

 

I have an admission. I still use Facebook, although it's more out of inertia than anything positive relating to the "experience", which is going from bad to worse.

I've a few friends from the 2010s who I still keep in touch with there.

I've got a "Sickly Cakes" album that I like to update.

I'm in a few groups - writers, ex-colleagues, local busybodies - that it's worth keeping up with.

And I have my books page, The Bother in Burmeon & Chums, which has been bumbling along since 2012 and I see no reason to bring it to a halt.

But I may have to. Last week, after posting the gorgeous retro-ads from Punch 1968 here, I thought I'd put them on Facebook, too. It wasn't long before I was given a good ticking-off:

Your Page, The Bother in Burmeon & Chums, didn't follow the rules, so it isn't being suggested to other people at the moment.

Hi Susan,

Your Page or some of its content didn't follow our Recommendations Guidelines. These guidelines determine what content can be recommended to people. To be eligible for recommendations, either fix these issues or request a review.

I started a wild goose-chase around Facebook and ended up not much the wiser about which particular rules hadn't been followed. This shed a little more light on things, but only a sliver:

No humans seem to have been involved in the decision. I'm certainly not guilty of trying to sell weapons, odd kidneys, body parts of protected species. Or depicting graphic violence or pornography.

The closest I come to "promoting the use of certain regulated products" is that my post featured some rather quaint 58-year-old print ads for cigs, booze and razor blades. 

Ho hum.

And I would have forgotten all about it by the next morning had I not received a slew of pushy messages prompting me to make an ad out of the offending post:

Oh, good grief, I thought.

It's rather like those telecoms companies where they're banging on about purpose and sustainability on the one hand and trying to get you to upgrade your tariff with more and more super-mega-giga data volume on the other. 

Maybe it's no wonder that I'm at my happiest living in the past.

 

RETROWURST: Wizard ads, old boy (March 1968)

 

Chocks away and time for a swift flypast of the world of print advertising in the 1960s. Some of my earliest memories of advertising trace back to this era. I've had a delightful trip down memory lane in the pages of Punch, the RAF Fiftieth Birthday Number, dated 13th March 1968.

I'll start with the two best-placed (and most expensive) ads. Back cover and inside front cover. These were the pole positions back in those days. And it's no surprise that they're occupied by two of the brands most associated with pilots and derring-do:

I love the sheer heroic aplomb of these ads. There's a supreme confidence about them, a simple assuredness, rather reflecting the character of the (idealised) target audience.

The colour ads in the body of the magazine are a little more subtle. The reader has to be momentarily distracted from the cartoons and articles and find something intriguing enough to look further. Here are two booze brands - Martini and Guinness:

The advertising spans the expected categories - ciggies, booze, clothes, cars, travel, banking - with brands such as Senior Service, Glenfarclas, Courage, Wolseley, Church's Shoes, Trevira, Lombard Banking, TAP Airlines, Pure New Wool/Woolmark and High Speed Gas (remember that?)

And there were job ads, too. I expect this wasn't designed to be an interactive ad, and it's probably as well I didn't pursue a career in Art Direction:

Punch, like many of the brands featured, died with the 20th century. 

But there's a useful archive here , should you want to see what raised a chuckle or two in the days when pilots weren't on automatic.