great moments in marketing: coin of the land

while searching out something totally unrelated i came across some w. duke & sons tobacco insert cards which i wanted to pass along. first off some background: the modern tact of utilizing every possible surface (including but not limited to, walls, truck sides, building tops, and people’s chests and foreheads) as advertising space goes back a long way indeed. in the 1880’s tobacco monopoly the american tobacco company, makers of durham green leaf, (and direct ancestor of everything from r.j. reynolds to duke university) began utilizing the small cardboard insert used to firm up its cigarette packs as a novel bit of ad space; made all the more novel in that the ads were not necessarily proper ads at all. more often they were meant to be “collectables” another clever marketing ploy still going strong today.

a quote from the library of congress page on w. duke & sons’ tobacco advertising:

The tobacco companies used trade cards (similar to business cards), tin tags and posters to advertise their products. Color lithography developed in the late 1870s, and businesses could now promote themselves with a variety of attractive colorful images, some having nothing at all to do with any of their products.

Taking advantage of the development of color, James B. Duke revealed his marketing talent with the creation of a whole new way of advertising tobacco and cigarettes. With each pack of cigarettes, a small cardboard insert was added to stiffen the box. Duke employed a little imagination and turned these simple work-horses into a powerful marketing tool by printing the brand name of the cigarettes along with a picture that was part of a larger series and which was meant to be collected. Series of birds, flags, Civil War generals, and baseball players were employed, frequently with historical or educational information on them.

anyhow, that last bit about presenting “historical or educational information” brings me to the cards i wanted to share, the “coins of the world” series. these are ostensibly meant to be educational (more properly edutainment in modern ad speak), depicting the likeness of coins from all over the world. now rather than simply show the coin and call out in large text the coin’s country of origin, the coin is instead shown in tandem with a “typical” denizen of each country. seeing as how these were put out sometime in the late 1800’s this means the coins are shown with over the top, stereotypical, illustrations that manage in their way to insult very nearly every country and race on the planet. admittedly some come off as innocent charicature but others are blatantly offensive. see below for some examples-








where as every facet of advertising has ballooned and mutated out of proportion the use of straight forward ol’ fashioned racism has been tempered and sublimated, made infinitely more subtle if it’s going to be employed at all, which many would argue it is. i can’t help but wonder if this is a blunt force marketing tool which the suckers of satan’s cock (as bill hicks labeled anyone in marketing) sorely miss today? is it harder to drill the coins of the world into people’s heads without the additional visual cue of their accompanying stereotypes?

it strikes me that were this sort of thing still done today the entire set, as seen here, could all have pennies on them with the united states listed beside the offensive character… and how, pray tell, would the geniuses at w. duke & sons show the euro i wonder?

the nypl site has many of this series up to view in more detail, as well as the related series of coins of ancient cultures.

posted by jmorrison on 12/10 | lost & found - wtf | | send entry