The Listener’s archive stretches from October 1939 to last week. For decades, issues of the magazine were preserved by being bundled into compendium lots that were then bound as hefty, red-cloth-covered books, the year stamped in gold on the spine. In more recent times, digital preservation has replaced the red books. Physical copies of the magazine are still deposited with the National Library (which recently announced that in partnership with Are Media, this title’s owner, it will add the Listener to its searchable (paperspast.natlib.govt.nz) and kept at the magazine’s office for reference.
But it’s the shelves of red spines that draw the eye. And just as each book gives a snapshot of what New Zealand was talking about, thinking, watching and reading at that time, it’s also a portal into what we were being sold. Here, Paul Little assesses Christmas advertising in decades past.
December 11, 1964: Ballantynes Department Store
This panoply of tempting Christmas goodies is like an open window on to a past long gone. Sure, the crafting community exists today, but it is a shadow of the self it would have been in 64. A work basket – tapestry or otherwise – is no longer a staple of the domestic sitting room. These days, its contents have expanded and your crafter has converted a spare bedroom into an artisan space.
“Men’s Travelling Slippers” don’t sound very convenient. Where on Earth do they go? Do you have to lock them in at night? Perhaps the anachronistic Cigarette Pack Holder with its sensuously alluring “soft plastic” material and decorative panel that doubles as a pocket – how ingenious! – could be adaptively repurposed into a duffel bag for tiny, tiny people? Ballantynes managed to pack a lot into this page but hard calls would have been made when deciding not to illustrate some items, such as the Gilt Metal Pillbox, Popular Folding Coathanger or Silver-plated Pavlova Slice.
December, 1974
For those who lamented the commercialisation of Christmas, turning the birth of their saviour into an occasion for greed and venal displays of materialism, these four ads – which together added up to one page of magazine – would have been terribly triggering, if people had been saying triggering in 1974.
Because the concept of “miracle” is stretched to breaking point and possibly beyond in these four cases. The Yellow Submarine-type shooting star graphics presumably are also a subtle – if that’s the word – allusion to celestial events surrounding the nativity. A standout is the Cosmetic 2 in 1 Glo Mirror, which is “for every woman”, unlike all those niche mirrors. Its “non-dazzle lighting” presumably addressed a long-felt need: “Mum, the mirror’s lighting is dazzling me again!” The carefully curated colour choices of orange, gold and blue provide all the confirmation you need that this was the mid-70s. Special mention for the Miracle Three Comb Set made of “boil-proof … polypropylene”, because, yes, there was apparently a time when we boiled our combs.
December 15, 1984: Cadbury Continental chocolates
Chocolates have always been the ultimate in low-maintenance gift giving. They required no thought, were economical and everyone, allegedly, liked them. Until recently, everyone did dairy and there were no vegans. “The Continent”, meaning Europe, was the benchmark for sophistication, hence, as it said on the box, these were “chocolates of distinction” not just the riff-raff of the choccy world – your dairy milks and fruit and nuts.
The names of the bonbons were carefully chosen to activate Eurocentric neurons, even when they had nothing to do with the flavours. Hence: Caramel de luxe, Valencia whirl, Parisian Crunch, Viennese Fudge and Neapolitan cluster. Chocolate specialisation has, of course, got out of hand in the past few years thanks to the efforts of Whittaker’s which seems unable to see a flavour they don’t want to adulterate by mixing it with mandarin or feijoa. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même choc.
December 17, 1994: Hewlett-Packard
It’s the dreaded Christmas advertorial – paid-for space designed to look like a story in a magazine or newspaper. Results can be awkward. Some people might have got a little lost at the attempt to provide a journalistic connection here by linking the HP range with a fascinating yarn about how New Zealand is one of the world’s hot spots for marine mammals.
It appears to have had something to do with putting scientists in igloos to save sealions. From its attention-grabbing opening line – “Season’s greetings from Hewlett Packard (NZ) Ltd”, to its closing cadences, HP throws all the mystifying combinations of random letters and numbers it can find at the probably not very tech-savvy magazine reader. There’s the HP200LX, the HP95L and the occasional invented word to add to the intimidation factor, like the HP Vectra Multimedia PC with ergonomics incorporating an audio cover with integrated speaker. Even more intimidating, ungrammatical and frustratingly unexplained is the section on the “palmtop computer”, where we encounter the warning to: “Watch out: very soon your life depends on it.” Not shown: the internet, which did not exist as we know it at this time.
December 11, 2004: Bonus Bonds
Wishing you is right. Bonus Bonds were the gift that never even started giving. The choice of an angel rather than Santa Claus to represent the season indicates either a religious orientation or subtle recognition that you had so little chance of collecting even one dollar, let alone a million, that it would indeed have been a miracle.
Certainly, Bonus Bonds offered a Christmas gift for the Post Office, which for years flogged off these useless pieces of novelty scrip as gift options for aunties and uncles with no imagination whatsoever when it came to present selection. According to our online research, the odds of winning $1 million in a monthly draw were about 0.00003% and the odds of winning $5000 were 1 in 130,769,231. But there was a draw every month! And every month, 99.996% of bond holders won precisely zip. A reminder that gambling really is a gamble – it only works if nearly everyone loses.
December 18 2014: Subscribe and win
This was the only Christmas-themed ad in the 18 December 2014 issue of the Listener. No announcements concerning chocolates, grooming products, palmtop computers or tapestry work baskets. And it is a house ad, which is to say, not an ad paid for by a customer, but an ad for the company that makes the publication. In this case, Bauer Media, who at the time were the German publishers of the Listener and are now best remembered for shutting the better part of the New Zealand magazine industry down on a Zoom call on April 2, 2020, eight days after the country had gone into Covid lockdown. That this is the only Christmas ad in that issue reflects, shall we say, the magazine’s, if not the entire industry’s, move away from an advertising-driven revenue model.