1970s Fumetti Ads

A Maxwell House ad from the November 1976 issue of Woman's Day featuring Vivian "Ethel Mertz" Vance... Vance was the spokesperson for Maxwell House for several years, and did a string of TV commercials for them. I can't offhand find if this particular scenario was one of them, but I suspect it was and that this comic was created by just taking still shots from the commercial footage. That seemed to be a not-uncommon practice in the 1970s, presumably taking advantage of the generally costlier TV budget and leveraging that to reduce print ad costs. Here's Don Knotts (and Don Knotts) acting as a pitchman for Dodge a couple years later...

These look to me like they were blocked and staged for television. The script got editted down for one-page brevity and the whole thing was handed over to a paid-lower-than-they-should-be graphic designer to get a bunch of individual frames cropped and fitting on a page.

Anecdotally, I feel like this approach dropped off considerably during the '80s, which I presume had to do with the diminishing impact of print advertising. Possibly also a trend in advertising more broadly to go with a more nuanced approach, and not just clobber audiences over the head with contrived situations to blatantly talk up the selling points of their product. In any event, it's an interesting time-capsule of advertising -- when TV commercial storytelling overlapped heavily with print to come up with fumetti as an entire genre of magazine advertising.

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