Modern Advertising of Food and Drinks I

Modern Advertising of Food and Drinks I
The invention of modern advertising can largely be credited to patent medicine sellers of the reconstruction era.

They came up with all sorts of spurious and even dangerous cures for such ill-defined diseases as neuralgia and dyspepsia, which seemed epidemic in that unsettled time.

To promote their nostrums, the hucksters scared their customers with “facts” almost guaranteed to induce psychosomatic symptoms, printed advertisements offering miraculous cures , enlisted celebrities as spokesman, and sponsored traveling medicine shows where quack doctors and their accomplishes testified to the efficacy of their potions.

Early soft drinks were sold and marketed as patent medicines. An 1892 advertisement for Coca-Cola was typical of the genre: the carbonated potion was recommended as “the ideal brain tonic for headache & exhaustion.”

Coffee substitute were originally was originally promoted in much the same way. As late as 1951, the Federal trade Commission was investigating the Post Company for running ads for its Postum beverage claiming that drinking coffee discourage marriage or that it results in “divorce business, business failures, factory accidents, juvenile delinquency, traffic accidents, fire or home foreclosures.”
Modern Advertising of Food and Drinks I