Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Fig.3
Advertisement for Mortein Plus (AWW, January 6th, 1954, p.36)
making family members sick, with children
particularly vulnerable to illness (see similarly
Martens and Scott 2006 on germs and cleaning
more broadly). Concerns about flies’ disease
carrying capacity proliferated across
advertisements and ranged from the generalised
concern that flies would bring ‘sickness’ into the
home, to more specific concerns about
gastroenteritis and polio that referenced broader
public health campaigns and the perspectives of
health experts, including doctors. Public health
authorities were concerned about the spread of
polio at this time, but it was the product marketers
that most readily mobilised and carried this fear
into the public domain, depicting flies as carriers
of death rather than simply illness. These
representations were enacted across a range of
products from fly screen like barriers (59 per cent
of advertisements) to poisons and baits (41 per
cent of advertisements). An advert for AGCO
Supascreens, for instance, pointed to the
imminence of death and its place at the dinner
table – the conceptual heart of the 1950s family,
observing:
‘The filthy annoying fly can carry
death to your dinner table. Shut him
out – for if he enters, typhoid and
polio may be riding with him.’
(AWW, Dec 23, 1953: 32).
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Advertisements were never subtle. Headlines like
that accompanying Cyclone’s popular
screenwire product: “You may be revolted but
that’s better than being dead!” (see Figure 1)
were common, and sought to consolidate and
build upon homemakers’ senses of insecurity
within home.
Allusions to the capacity of flies to carry
death into the home declined over the reviewed
periods in line with their decreased public health
threat, and paralleling the declining prevalence
of diseases such as polio. More recent
advertisements shifted attention to cockroaches,
with flies appearing predominately amongst lists
of other insect pests. However, despite the shift in
the type of pest depicted, these adverts played
on similarly exaggerated themes that placed
emphasis on the violence caused by pests and
their inevitable connection with disease (rather
than death). All advertisements emphasised the
importance of killing cockroaches found inside
the home and setting up poisonous barriers so
that those outside could not enter. The multinational
company Mortein was responsible for the
vast majority of these advertisements, appearing
multiple times in key positions throughout
magazines in each year and edition. As in the
earlier periods the offending pest was
represented as disturbing the cleanliness of
home, an outcome affected by connecting
home’s cleanest spaces with its dirtiest. A series of