INTERVIEW
Promotions past
Promotional freebies from days gone by can sometimes turn into sought after collectables – as a museum in London’s Notting Hill demonstrates. Sara McDonnell talks to the man whose passion for collecting everyday goods now charts the history of the brand
I
n 1963 a pack of Munchies was bought by a sixteen-year-old boy at Inverness railway station in Scotland. Little did anyone know that this
would be the start of what is now an important cultural collection representing Britain’s consumer society in the 20th century. In the 46 years since that humble purchase, Robert Opie has acquired more than half a million items, from cereal boxes to cigarette packs, all of which show how household brands have evolved into the familiar and sometimes evocative images which surround us today. Some of the collection is now on display at the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising, in a mews just off Portabello Road in London’s Notting Hill. The museum is an Aladdin’s cave of well-recognised brands and 20th century ephemera. It makes fascinating viewing for anyone with a memory of growing up in Britain, as the brands featured are, and have been, so commonplace that they are quite possibly indelibly etched onto the British psyche. Stalwart giants such as Kelloggs and Cadbury are represented through the decades alongside those which came and went (Quatro, Spangles, etc). And yet the packs that carry these brands are so transient that the normal life expectancy of many of the exhibits could only have been a matter of weeks. Now, however, these items have become part of history and have all been lovingly categorised and placed, mainly chronologically, in glass displays. While the museum shows how packaging and advertising were both intrinsic in building up a brand’s visibility (there are particularly interesting examples of how Johnsons’s baby powder’s logo developed and how Cadbury chocolate acquired its association with the colour purple), it also features
| 66 | April 2010
many different promotional freebies and how they were used to tempt consumers. Where, then, does the owner of this vast collection see the beginnings of the promotional freebie in consumer goods? I ask Robert Opie this question as he shows me around the exhibition. “Back in the 1890s, with cigarette cards,” he says, pointing to a display of vintage Ogdens, Player and Wills cigarette packets. “Some packs back then were quite flimsy, so a card was required to stiffen the pack. These cards would originally have had adverts for the cigarettes printed on them, but they soon evolved into themed sets which everyone wanted to save – and then tried to complete the set, with a picture on one side and information on the other. Themes would vary widely from film stars and football players to butterflies or flowers. They were really quite a sophisticated promotional idea for its time,” he continues. “This was an age before such
information would have been widely available.” After talking to the owner of this extensive collection for just a few minutes, it becomes clear that Opie’s knowledge of brands, ad campaigns and promotional items is encyclopedic. When I admit ignorance of a particular ad campaign, he jokes, rather kindly, “you haven’t lived, have you?” He can often pin a particular marketing campaign to a year, or at least a decade, even those more than a century ago. As we walk around the exhibits, he points at things, such as a cabinet devoted to the ’66 World Cup, and explains, “that was the first time a World Cup event had a mascot”. When we pass some small cereal packets, I ask him when the mini boxes of cereal were first introduced, and he tells me that they were first in the US as early as 1938. “In 1958 the variety pack was introduced into the UK - they were packs of six originally, rather than the eight that you see today.” With so many different
promotional items having been offered over the years since then, I wonder which have really stood out for Opie. It seems that the petrol companies have come up trumps on this one. He describes the Tiger in Your
Tank campaign from Esso in 1963 –
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
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