Scanning Around with Gene: The Only Thing We Have to Fear…

One popular New Year’s resolution is to get organized, which is why retailers often feature lots of storage containers and organizational goods in January ads. It always works for me, and since I’m moving soon, my need this year for plastic tubs has increased beyond the usual January levels.

While packing one particular tub with torn-up magazines and old postcards, I noticed the following warning sticker inside the lid:

Not only did it strike me as sad that anyone needs to be warned against packing a baby inside an airtight plastic tub, but it triggered my natural instinct to assume that if something can go wrong, you better prepare for it, even if the possibility is remote. Why not, for example, poke a few holes in each container so the poor baby can breath?

When I grew up, thanks to my mother being a school nurse, every sharp object, hard surface, body of water, and invisible germ was a potential death threat that needed careful planning to avoid. On Saturdays my friend and I walked to Woolworths, and on the way we passed a State Farm Insurance office with photos in the window of horrific car accidents and other disasters that might strike anyone at any time. In those days lots of the accidents seemed to involve cars getting hit by trains, and busses falling into ravines.

Fearful thinking is a godsend to the insurance industry and others, as they market services and products to those who expect the worst. Statistically the odds of being hit by a speeding train, having our hands chopped off in a lawnmower accident, or getting electrocuted because some careless person put a penny in the fuse box are very low. But we can’t completely ignore the potential because, like winning the lottery, those things do happen to someone.

So my favorite fear ads show the consequences of poor planning. The orphan child, the widowed wife unable to provide for herself, the charred remains of an uninsured home. Here are a few examples from (in order) 1941, 1960, 1952, and 1938.

These show-the-worst ads may have been a little too negative, even for insurance companies, so many instead portrayed a potential disaster shortly before it happened, or even better, that was somehow avoided just in the nick of time. Here, from 1947, are two of my favorites, followed by a terrific almost-disaster ad for Eveready batteries in 1946. Seems the poor mother came just this close to giving her baby poison instead of cough syrup. (We can all understand how easy that would be, since storing cough medicine next to poison in the medicine cabinet is such a sensible thing to do. Like storing your baby in an air-tight plastic tub.)

Many ads play off the fears of unexpected injury or ill health: One day you go in for the usual checkup and next thing you know you have a catastrophic deadly disease that will break your family. At least in those days the doctors often made house calls so they could break the bad news to you at home.

Go to page 2 for more valuable insurance-sponsored life lessons, including “Don’t leave your gun under your pillow,” “Don’t handle bull without stick,” and “Don’t smoke while playing Santa Claus.” Thank goodness someone told me!

Some insurance companies decided that focusing on prevention and education might be a better tactic, but they still exploited the underlying fear to get results. Here, from 1958 is an ad promoting seat-belt use, then one suggesting that a little relaxation might help your ulcers, and one from 1937 that suggests even a deep-sea diver knows better than to travel more than 50 miles per hour.

And just in case you didn’t know using drugs could interfere with your driving skills, this brochure from the National Safety Council in 1966 fills you in on those details. The same pamphlet, now hopefully tongue-in-cheek, also shows you thirteen ways to kill Grandma.

By 1960 when the ad below ran for Metropolitan Life Insurance, the shift had clearly begun from presenting health issues as somewhat-random possibilities to something of your own creation.

But as far as educating people on the hazards of life that can well be avoided, this series of photographs from 1938 is my favorite. The multi-page spread in Saturday Evening Post was sponsored by various insurance companies and used Red Cross data to highlight some of the more common avoidable accidents.

The biggest fear many insurance companies still play on today is the worry that you may leave your loved ones with nothing. These ads from 1939 show that a truly good man knows his value may be even greater after he dies.

I’ve needed the benefit of insurance in the past and I’m not suggesting it is a less-than-noble business. But some of the current television ads that graphically show accidents as they happen, or might happen, make me wish we had come a little further from those days when my friend and I would stand in front of the State Farm office and imagine just how gruesome a train hitting a car full of kids could be.

Gene Gable has spent a lifetime in publishing, editing and the graphic arts and is currently a technology consultant and writer. He has spoken at events around the world and has written extensively on graphic design, intellectual-property rights, and publishing production in books and for magazines such as Print, U&lc, ID, Macworld, Graphic Exchange, AGI, and The Seybold Report. Gene's interest in graphic design history and letterpress printing resulted in his popular columns "Heavy Metal Madness" and "Scanning Around with Gene" here on CreativePro.com.
  • laurashu says:

    I think the best ad is the one warning Santa to be careful. That is so funny! Come on, not everyone is Santa, they should show that ad at the North Pole instead of a general public service announcement.

    Thanks again Gene for an entertaining study :)

  • Anonymous says:

    As a Briton I think of “Mummy” as an East Atlantic word; Americans use “Mommy”. I was surprised to see two clearly American adverts using what I thought they would have considered an alien term.

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