I‘ll never forget the first time I used a tampon: It was an eighth-grade field trip to a water slide park, and I was bleeding like a wounded soldier. I knew I had two choices: Suffer all day, legs crossed, while my friends did some serious frolicking — or use a tampon.

Before changing into my swimsuit, I went into a stall to study the hard-to-read, clinical-sounding instructions that came with the box. What the hell were they talking about? Several of my friends were veteran tampon users, but I was alone in that bathroom, fumbling with the cardboard applicator and wincing through the painful insertion.

This memory came flooding back to me when I recently stumbled upon the Tampax Web site — a treasury of useful information and support for young women undergoing such rites of passage. If only, I thought, I’d had a place like this to turn during the awkward years of puberty.

Tampax.Com is one of the best company sites on the Web. Lots of corporations talk about using the Net to go beyond traditional advertising; Tampax — along with Kotex, which has built a similar site — shows what that can mean.

Tampax.Com is split into two main spaces: T Room, a site for girls ages 14 to 16 (though, based on the content, I’d lower that to ages 10 to 14), and the sleek T Lounge, for worldly-wise teenagers (it’s ostensibly aimed at women ages 18-24, but it reads just like Seventeen magazine).

T Room is hosted by a fictional character named Tina, whose bedroom serves as a front door to content like fashion critiques, music reviews and a monthly diary. Tampon-shaped navigation bars guide you to everything from issues-oriented articles to creative things to do with tampons. The content has a clearly feminist bent, tossing aside the Spice Girls for strong-woman icons Mary Lou Lord and Ani DiFranco.

For the T Lounge’s older visitors, Tampax provides everything from relationship quizzes to monthly themed articles on careers, friendship and beauty. “Relax, put some tunes on the stereo and get ready for some truth!” advises one editorial. The advice questions are frank about sexuality and menstruation. Posts in the moderately active bulletin board range in topics from eating disorders to how to have “real sex.” And when you click on a button to redecorate the entire site — velour, contemporary, outdoorsy or lava lamp — it’ll remember your preferred style on return visits.

Kotex’s site, particularly the area called “Girls Space,” is similar to the T Room, though its design is less sophisticated — opting for a cute “girly” lavender background and pull-down menus instead of the hip navy hues and mouse-activated headlines of Tampax’s site. And the majority of the content deals with the rapidly changing bodies of pubescent girls, not music and fashion.

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But when it comes to educating young women about tampons and menstruation, Kotex shows a far better understanding of its readers’ fears and desires than Tampax. For example, Tampax’s sterile, cold treatment of anatomy (“The urinary opening, vagina, and anus are located quite close together. Solid waste material contains many bacteria”) relies on bland medical diagrams. Kotex shaped its content by looking at the questions young girls ask in calls to its hot line. The site uses easy-on-the-eyes cartoonlike illustrations and actually walks you through self-exploration: “You might wish to consult an illustration, or better yet, use a handy dandy mirror to hold between your legs. OK, OK, this might feel a little bizarre at first, but jeez, how else are you going to learn about you?”

Both the Kotex and Tampax sites provide high-quality information in impressive depth. And because they’re online, they offer personal interaction not possible in a classroom or a book — along with anonymity for the shy or embarrassed.

“People can get very personal information whenever they want, wherever, so they can find out how their body works without asking mom or dad,” explains Judy Barton, account manager at Organic, the company that built Kotex’s Web site.

Cimeron Dunlap, Organic’s director of marketing, adds, “It’s meant to make them comfortable, and not feel queasy about the topic of menstruation. They would not have that if they saw a commercial on the TV. It’s a much deeper relationship that’s available on the Web.”

The designers of both the Tampax and Kotex sites say their primary objective is educational: “It’s all about empowering girls and making them feel good about their body,” explains Barton.

Of course. But these are businesses, too: Isn’t the sharp design and useful content just an underhanded way of marketing a product to young girls who aren’t savvy enough to know when they’re the targets of “branding”?

One of Kotex’s more nifty interactive functions is clearly meant to push product: pull-down menus where you enter information about your period to calculate which Kotex products best match your “flow” and “lifestyle.” And, of course, on both sites, all pages lead back to tampons — an article may begin discussing boyfriend problems, but rest assured it will end with product placement.

Tampax offers free samples throughout the site. “What we want them to do is request samples. This is a company whose business is selling products and helping young girls to make the right decision,” says Susan Goodman, marketing vice president at Think Inc., which developed the Tampax site.

So isn’t Tampax just using its inviting content to close a sale? Sure — but they’re also providing a valuable service: informing young girls about their bodies in a cool, safe environment.

“This is not Joe Camel. This is something that’s important for young girls, for their self-image, for their health, for their lives. We’re creating a forum for them to talk to each other and get much needed information in a comfortable place as opposed to getting the wrong information, feeling shameful about it,” says Megan O’Connor, accounts supervisor at Think Inc.

And she’s right. Tampons are all pretty much the same, and they are necessary — unlike cigarettes, soda pop and other junk marketed to young people on the Web. These companies have provided a public resource; there’s nothing wrong with buying their goods in return.

“We try not to dupe [girls] into something that they’re not interested in. It doesn’t take any underhanded efforts. It’s very focused on information and education. If we provide people with that, they will look at Kotex and say, Wow! They’re the ones that gave me that information and helped me,” Barton says.

It’s a smart strategy — one that demonstrates how commercialism can move beyond the exclusively self-serving marketing message. Wouldn’t it be nice if other companies followed that lead? Imagine if Coca-Cola used its site to promote a social cause. Or if Budweiser hosted a discussion on the hazards of binge drinking . Or R.J. Reynolds offered education on cancer risks.

Well, OK, we won’t hold our breaths for that. But there’s plenty more room for corporate Web sites to go beyond traditional marketing. No one can say that public service and product promotion are mutually exclusive — not after what Tampax and Kotex have done on the Web. I only wish their sites had been around when I was 13.

In a simpler time, when automobiles went slower and the pre-Eisenhower highway system in the United States was less developed, there was a popular advertising campaign that ran from 1927 until 1963. It consisted of rhymed messages sequentially staked on the right side of the road, all ending with the advertiser’s name, “Burma-Shave.”

Examples of vintage Burma-Shave road signs, including a blue South Dakota version. (Ray Crockett photo)

These red ads (one state, South Dakota, insisted that they be dark blue to keep them from conflicting with the red reserved for warning notices) usually consisted of five signs. For example: “DON’T PASS CARS/ON CURVE OR HILL/IF THE COPS DON’T GET YOU/ MORTICIANS WILL/BURMA-SHAVE.”

Some slogans touted Burma-Shave as a pre-aerosol “brushless” shaving cream—a cream you could scoop out of a jar and lather onto your face without relying on an old-fashioned brush and moistened soap in a mug.

 

("Thoroly"? I guess if the word doesn't fit the composition, change the spelling. . .)

In 1925, Clinton Odell, a Minneapolis lawyer, took the liniment his father created and transformed it into a brushless shaving cream. He named his company Burma-Vita—Burma, because most of the essential oils in the liniment were from the Burmese portion of the Malay Peninsula, and Vita from the Latin for “life”: “Life from Burma.”

Some of Burma-Shave’s primary “brushless shaving cream” competitors were Barbasol and Noxema.

The company was sold to Philip Morris in 1963, and all the signs were removed soon thereafter. As a testament to the campaign’s cultural significance, a set of signs was donated to the Smithsonian, where it still resides. But the brand eventually petered out. After being sold yet again (this time to the American Safety Razor Company) and then reintroduced in 1997, it never regained a hold in the market.

A history of the Burma-Vita Company, written by Frank Rowsome Jr. and illustrated by Carl Rose, was published by the Stephen Greene Press in 1963.

By the early 1960's, the rising costs of road-sign maintenance (as well as new and more effective ways of advertising) sounded the death knell for the Burma-Shave signs.

The following pages from Frank Rowsome Jr.’s book list all the road-sign Burma-Shave phrases produced from 1927 to 1963.

I became interested in pop bottles (I grew up in the Chicago area where we all said “pop”) and related stuff when I was about 12 years old. I had gone inside an old garage that was attached to a neighborhood house that was being torn down and inside was a cache of un-returned pop bottles that must have dated from the 1940-’50s period. I took one of each type home (about 20 of ‘em) and yes, still have them to this day. I really got off on all the different labels and colors of glass and because I used to like to read old magazines I actually recognized most of the brands that were no longer around or had changed their design. I’ll go into this more in a future post, but wanted to lay some sort of a foundation for this piece, which is exclusively on 7Up, with a special focus on their branding efforts of the 1950s.

The soft drink that would be known as 7Up was created in 1929 by Charles Leiper Grigg in St.Louis as part of his “Howdy” line of sodas and was originally called “Bib-Label Lithiated (it contained the mood stabilizer lithium citrate until 1950) Lemon-Lime Soda.” It was almost immediately re-labeled “7 (7 natural flavors) Up Lithiated Lemon-Lime,” and then finally just “7Up”.

The first 7Up logo from 1929.

In terms of logos, an original winged trademark soon gave way to the red squared logo that lasted until the late 1960s that coincided with that period’s brilliant “Uncola” re-branding campaign. I always felt they had GOLD in that Uncola moniker. . .

A 1935 7Up label before the Howdy Company's name was changed to 7Up in 1936, followed by two Howdy beverage labels.

By the late 1940s 7Up was the third most popular soft drink in the United States. By the time the 1950s rolled around, the company had employed extensive branding techniques to keep the momentum going. The following three binders contain examples of what was offered to the bottlers and distributors to reinforce the product’s presence.

A catalog of 7Up sales/marketing items circa 1954.

This page includes tipped-in glossy paint chips.

These next three pages would NEVER fly with the HR Dept in 2012. . .

Before everyone had TV's in their home, it was common to go out to watch television.

7Up Sales & Promotion Merchandise Catalog circa 1954 - 59.

(would love to have those binders. . .)

Actual cloth swatches included.

More swatches.

1959 "Salesmakers" Catalogue

2 actual decals using the older logo with the woman reaching for bubbles- love the way the color is broken down into separate shapes and levels.

Actual booklet attached.

"Fresh Up Freddie" was the 7Up mascot created in 1957 by ad agency Leo Burnett and Walt Disney to help sponsor the Disney "Zorro" TV series.

Here’s a link to more info on “Freddie”: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/fresh-up-freddy.html

Remember, it's from 1959. . .

Ditto. . .

2 mid-1930's 7Up bottles.

Left: 1940's bottle with 8 bubbles on label. Right: 1950's bottle 7 bubbles.

"Like" was introduced in 1963 as a diet version of 7Up. It contained Calcium Cyclamate which was determined to be a carcinogen in 1969. "Like" was discontinued in that same year and Diet 7Up was introduced in 1970 sans the Cyclamates. This bottle is dated 1964.

Late 1960's/early 1970's can.

"The Uncola".

As a final footnote, I was lucky enough to work on spots for 7Up International using the Susan Rose/Joanna Ferrone character “Fido Dido”! Here’s one of my favorites done while I was at the Ink Tank Studio in N.Y.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JpHjeGXyw8

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

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As if Michael Jackson wasn’t creepy enough when he was alive. The self-proclaimed King of Pop, who died nearly three years ago, is making a return via a new Pepsi campaign. The fabulously un-self-aware tagline? “Live for Now.”

The corporation is set to festoon one billion cans of Pepsi around the world – that’s one billion cans – with the singer’s unmistakable silhouette. It’s a bold move for a company whose most famous association with Jackson is that back in 1984, his hair caught fire filming a commercial for them. Jackson’s estate orchestrated his sponsorship resurrection, and a family spokesperson confirmed to the Wall Street Journal Thursday that “more such marketing agreements are planned.” Did anyone else just feel that collective shudder of revulsion?

Somewhere, Charlie Sheen is laughing and saying, “At least I never did that.” This week, we learned what’s even less funny than Ashton Kutcher: Ashton Kutcher in brownface.

In an ill-advised Popchips ad spoofing online dating that launched Wednesday, the “Two and a Half Men” star appeared as a variety of love-hungry “World Wide Lovers” vying for your affection. In a spectacular display of racial tone-deafness, one of them included “Raj.” Raj, all darkened skin and heavy accent, is “a Bollywood producer looking for the most delicious thing on the planet.” He’s looking for something “Kardashian hot … I would give that dog a bone.” He brags that he once won a milking contest, and he does a little dance that will haunt your nightmares.

The Federal Communications Commission voted 2 to 1 this morning to require broadcasters to post political ad data on the Web, making it easier for the public to see how as much as $3.2 billion will be spent on TV advertising this election.

The files — which, among other information, detail the times ads aired, how much they cost, and whether stations rejected ad buy requests from campaigns — are currently available only on paper at stations.