Feeling lonely? Insecure? Don’t like your body? Losing your hair? Never fear, somebody somewhere has a solution. Just send money.
Profiting from people’s insecurities didn’t start with the internet or social media, as anybody who rummages through old magazines can tell you. Last week I was searching for some articles in Adam, a 1960s Australian magazine that was targeted at men. One thing that struck me was the way these pulp mags and their advertisers zeroed in on the weaknesses, fears and insecurities of their readers. That led to me noticing that these ads were really the precursors of the similar but even more targeted efforts we now dread, complain about and fall for on the internet.
These 1960s Adam advertisers knew what they were doing. They chose a magazine that was primarliy aimed at men and they spent money to target those men through their expected vulnerabilities. Adam, interestingly enough, was an offshoot of the highly successful Man magazine, published by Australian former ad man Kenneth Murray. Murray founded Man in 1936. It was based on the US magazine Esquire, and followed a similar formula. I guess in those days it was almost always the men in society who had disposable income, so these mags set out to profit by getting some of that income disposed of in their direction.
Adam‘s covers tell a story. Almost always they show a scantily clad woman helplessly watching while tough men pit their masculinity against each other or against nature. Strong men get the girls. Inside you find stories, “fact” or fiction, about tough men doing tough things. Women crop up a lot in the stories, usually as helpless dames awaiting the helping hand of a strong man but sometimes as wily femmes fatale, luring hapless males hither and thither, depending on the inclination of their feminine instincts. Oh, and sport. Also war.
Towards the back of any given issue of Adam magazine you find the advertisements, and a very high percentage of them are targeted at readers’ insecurities. Looking back from the vantage point of the year 2026 it’s easy to find them quaint and funny. I got a giggle from some of them, for sure. But I guess we are now so used to this kind of targeting that we don’t often stop to consider the calculated callousness that’s present in much of it.
These days the targeting, thanks to the relentless theft of private data carried out by the massive corporations that increasingly own the internet, is much more granular and precise. These days it only requires a young girl taking down a selfie picture from Facebook, or telling a friend online that she feels worthless, for the targeting machines of Big Data to flood her feed with ads for cosmetics, weight loss or whatever.
These days a man identified as lonely by the ever-vigilant web-bots can expect to be baited with increasingly explicit invitations to online porn, be subjected to awful male “role models” like Andrew Tate telling them how to man up and demand what they want from women, or be hit with targeted ads for products and services that promise to transform their lives. At least in the 1960s the barrage was not so ferocious, but that’s only because the technology did not yet exist to make it so. And of course the social climate was different then too.
Here’s a selection of exploitative ads from a few copies of Adam, all published in 1964.
It seems there were quite a few operators claiming to have hundreds of eager lonely clients, all anxious to meet other lonely people. Pay the money and you either get professionally introduced or you get a catalogue and do your own choosing. I hope somebody who reads this blog has one of those catalogues in their drawer and is willing to send it me – in plain wrappers, of course.
Kissing lessons, going cheap
But let’s say you’re a lonely chap and you aren’t ready for the names and addresses just yet. You want to prepare yourself before you take that plunge. Glad you asked. Spend the money and learn some ancient love magic and some startling secrets. They’ll be tearing down your door. Which is when you will need to know when, how and where to kiss. Just two quid, if you can believe it.
Looks like the V.X. Corporation had it all figured out. Bald guys could get hair and skinny guys could muscle up. And learn karate too, which obviously helps. But even with hair and muscles and good martial arts moves you can still fall short. That’s when you need to get some real zing, possibly from some special pills which just happen to be available.
But sometimes even hair, muscles, kissing skills and zing won’t get you there. Get taller and fatter.
Wonderful! Now you are fat, tall, have hair, muscles and both kissing and karate skills. However, you still need luck. We can help with that too:
If none of this works then consider the possibility that you might be a woman. Perhaps that’s what’s been going wrong. Have you thought about that? In that case we have just the thing for you also:
Maybe some advertisers figured that some women would read their husband’s copy of Adam? Or maybe they thought men might be interested in suggesting some helpful products to their wives? Some Sabrina Cream in the Christmas stocking couldn’t go astray. And also this handy little Birthcaster, as approved by all the Christian churches. Because it’s useful to know, isn’t it?
And finally, the absolute last resort. You are tall, fat, hairy, kiss well, do karate, have big breasts and are/aren’t pregnant. But you feel crummy anyway. It’s time to get rid of your inferiority complex, once and for all. Just send for this free book from the British Institute of Practical Psychology.
I hope you’ve found this little journey into 1960s-style exploitative advertising as entertaining and thought-provoking as I have.
