Vintage camera ads reveal many awesome things about the past and show us how far we’ve come as photographers. We previously did a roundup of racy vintage camera ads years ago. But when looking for vintage Sigma lens ads, one in particular just popped up out of nowhere. Some folks may say this is an interesting ad. To put it more bluntly, it’s a racy, sexist, and crazy ad that barely advertises the lenses that it’s supposed to market. In some ways, it reminds me of modern influencers that happen to be attractive and who sell certain products in a very sexy way. There are tons of them everywhere; I don’t need to go into further detail about it.
Sometimes when I run into vintage camera and lens ads, I question their authenticity. But considering Sigma’s history with lens marketing way back when, I can make a good, educated guess that this is real. This isn’t the only ad that they’ve made that has been a bit questionable. There’s this ad from 1979 that more or less condones voyeurism with a telephoto zoom lens. then there’s this ad from 1978 that does the same thing.
What’s really crazy about the current ad in question, though, is that it’s playing off of very obvious sexualization and not talking about the lenses at all, really. It makes me wonder if they were targeting younger, lonely men to buy their lenses and to become voyeurs. It would explain a lot of the actions of people in the decade afterward with stalking and predatory behavior. It’s even more fascinating to think that all of this was just for the purpose of sales and a little bit of money.
To that end, I really wonder who thought that an ad like this was at all okay.
The last that I heard, Sigma usually buys reviews on YouTube (the way many other brands do), and does marketing via Facebook. Their marketing is far less bodacious in modern times, and instead really only would appeal to camera nerds. That’s just logical, as they don’t make a single product that would appeal to a mass consumer.
With all this in mind, ads like this only ever really happened in print. We never saw them like this on television perhaps because that medium hit a much larger market. But magazine ads were a far more private viewing experience.
But when I see an ad like this, I think about the New York City I grew up in where people actively read the newspaper and magazines on the subway. Folks would turn their heads to whatever their neighbor was reading and sometimes read along. I’d only imagine seeing this in a magazine on the subway for a prying neighbor to look over as someone hurriedly shuffles past the page to continue reading whatever in embarrassment. And as you’re shuffling through the pages, you’d only awaken your other neighbor from their snore d’oeuvre on the commute home.
Of course, with modern advertising, these kinds of ads might be happening and we’re just not aware of it. They might be targeting beauty influencers and telling them that they can get beautiful glow on their skin with gorgeous bokeh to make them pop out from the background and into their subject’s laps. Truly, I’ve got no idea what kind of advertising might be out there because it’s all so incredibly targeted. I think it would be fascinating for the camera brands to market on somewhere like Twitch where the ads aren’t necessarily targeted at all and it feels like old-school television where you actually learn about a specific product.
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It’s all quite curious!
