New Scientist 13th February 1975. Vol 65 No 936.
The main article for 13th February was Promises, promises:health for sale. “Some over-the-counter remedies and health aids are a boon, but many are useless or promoted in misleading terms. Where does UK protection fail, and what's to be done?”
Dr Donald Gould's piece on the proliferation of supposedly health-improving products examined the proprietary medicines industry and its increasingly television-lead advertising campaigns. While acknowledging that non-prescription medicines such as pain relievers, indigestion tablets and some skin preparations reduce the demands on NHS GPs through responsible self medication, Gould described how many products were promoted in misleading advertisements. In 1975 there were over 50 acts of Parliament governing advertising practice including the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 and the Medicines Act 1968 as well as a Code of Standards of Advertising Practice, administered by the Proprietary Association of Great Britain (PAGB) and British Code of Advertising Practice administered by a committee of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) which worked with a staff of 12 until Shirley Williams organised an expansion funded by a surcharge on press advertising expenditure, intended partly to make the ASA better known.
“His Lordship ( ASA chairman Lord Drumalybn) acknowledges that at the moment the man in the street is ignorant of the machinery designed for his protection, but, astonishingly, it appears that the brand managers – the advertisers themselves – are hardly better informed. In 1972 the British Market Research Bureau asked a number of brand managers whether the advertising industry had a code to regulate the content of advertising. A large majority said “Yes”, but when asked who controlled press advertising 32 per cent were straight “don't knows”, and the rest suggested various possibilities from the Press Council to the Newspaper Publishers Association , with only 16 per cent correctly identified either the CAP committee or ASA as the body involved. A survey is planned to establish the extent of the ignorance that has to be dispelled.”
Despite the proliferation of regulation of proprietary medicine advertising, including the pre-broadcast vetting of television commercial, the “ad men” either found ingenious ways round the definitions of wrong doing, or simply ignored the rules. According to Gould, the Phyllosan (“fortifies the over forties”) simply ignored the rule “that a full, varied and properly prepared diet needs to be supplemented by vitamin or mineral products.”
The Phillips Tonic Yeast advertisements cunningly stated that “if you're lacking these essential vitamins, Phillips Tonic Yeast could give you the extra vitality to cope with life” without mentioning that you would have to be so ill as to need hospitalisation or living on a near starvation diet of maize to need the product.
Beecham's Pills avoided the rule that no advert should state that laxative medicine needed to be taken on a regular basis by saying “Take Beecham's Pills at bedtime.” leaving the audience to jump to the conclusion that they were needed every night.
Gould wrote that that Ironplan contravened the rule the advertisements should not cause anxiety resulting from the belief that a viewer might suffer from a disease without the consumption of a product or suggest that its consumption might lead an individual to not seek medical attention for a disease. (“The kind of iron therapy doctors prescribe most” “Start a course of Ironplan before you get too low.”)
Fear and emotional blackmail seem to have been behind some advertisements. There was no evidence that vitamin E can be absorbed through the skin, but that did not stop advertisers from stating that you might delay the onset of age related wrinkles by spreading their cream on your face. Senatogen Junior Vitamins ran the shameless copy “You can't follow your child to school. We can.”, implying that it would be negligent to allow your child to face the dangers of infection at school by simply providing good food.
50 years later the internet is awash with 'influencers' pedaling any amount of unnecessary health and beauty products as well as wellness programmes that suggest support for mental health. A friend in need is a friend indeed.
Today fibre-optic cables bring the internet and television to millions of homes but in 1975 the technology was new. Page 384 of issue 936 has a report of a new cable connector device than was designed for engineers working on sites such as tunnels and voids. The device, developed at the Canadian Bell Research centre comprised two sections, a lower piece with a V shaped channel and an upper locking shell with wires which press the two cut ends of fibre optic cable together. No patent number was given and the initial report is attributed to the first 1975 issue of Electronic Letters. 50 years later optical devices abound and optical computers are an emerging technology.
Page 383 CCD cameras arrive on the scene reports on the first video cameras using charge couple devices (CCDs) to be commercially available later in 1975. Built by RCA the new cameras had an array of 160 000 elements and a resolution comparable to 2/3 inch vidicon tube. The units were intended for surveillance/monitoring and were short of contemporaneous broadcast standards. In 1975 the technology to use digital signals did not exist, and the output of the new CCD cameras would have been immediately converted to an analogue video signal. “The cheapest of the CCD elements is priced at $1500 and the cheapest CCD cameras are $3000. Nevertheless RCA says that the volume of sales should build up quickly, so the CCD elements will be selling for about $30 in the 1980s.”
Unlike today's New Scientist, issue 936 has 16 pages of classified advertisements and a double page advertisement for the new Hewlett-Packard HP-55 pocket calculator. Retailing at £226-80 ( £1723 at Dec 2024 prices) the calculator boasted 86 pre-programmed functions, 20 memories and 49 program steps.
No comments:
Post a Comment