JAMAICA has a good grip on advertising lingo and can trade shots with the best in the world. Goods, from the proverbial pin to an anchor, are advertised in our print and electronic media without a blush, inviting us to purchase items that, under normal circumstances, would be beyond our reach. Some of these claims are so incredible and yet, as the saying goes, there is always a buyer waiting to be hooked.

A so-called country bumpkin from upper Clarendon gives this joke on himself. Walking down Princess Street one Saturday he was attracted by a hawker announcing “Boys’ bath trunks, men bath trunks, buy one an’ yuh boun’ fi swim”.

Well, my friend, who had never been to a beach in his life, promptly bought a pair and the next day found himself heading to Jackson Bay for a swim.

“Ah put on me trunks an’ jump inna de water but a go right under and nearly drown. When dem pull me up, de wata jus’ a gallop outta me nose,” he says with a laugh.

Would you believe, though, that the following Monday he was right back in downtown Kingston trying to find the vendor to retrieve his money?

“Buy one an’ yuh boun’ fi swim.” That’s the power of street-talk advertising. Advertising is one of our great strengths and one of our great unsung industries. We talk it, walk it, sing it, play it, promoting every product under the sun in a way that would put Madison Avenue to shame.

Modern advertising messages with their explicit sexual content are as open as they were closed years ago. Language used today would make my mother say “Shut yu ears, boy”, as she moved to turn off the radio or send us packing to bed.

Fifty years ago, in 1954, the House of Issa rolled out an ad as tempting as you could get. “The age of discovery, geographically, may be over, but each day at Issa’s offers discoveries as fresh as the dawn, as colourful as the afterglow.”

Put that in today’s language on the screen and you get a voluptuous young lady snuggling into bed with her beau, demonstrating the art of discovery and somehow working that into the ad to make Issa’s the sexiest store in town.

In my boyhood days, advertising depended on the ear rather than the eye, as there was no TV and precious little movie access for a boy growing up in the country. So the radio carried the swing, and many were the favourite ditties which were sung along with the narrator as a matter of course.

They were popular and remarkably good lyrics, such as the Red Stripe Sports Report “with news of your favourite sport, now’s the time to relax, get the scores and the facts, on the Red Stripe Sports Report.”

Some of these advertising lines stay with you for decades. For example, the soft drink company Kelly’s touted that “it’s ok, it’s Kelly’s”, but our taste buds were equally tempted by local soft drink advertising from Oh So Grape or Diamond Minerals. Then there was the perennial rivalry between Ipana and Colgate toothpastes for your attention, with Ipana warding off tooth decay while Colgate brushed bad breath away.

Advertising is as old as the hills. Lost and found advertising messages have been found on writing material in ancient Greece and Rome. Cave paintings for commercial advertising represented an ancient advertising form. Advances in printing technology made it easier for advertisers to spread their messages to a wider audience. By natural progression advertising found its way over the years into newspapers, with England enjoying advertising space in the print media as early as the 19th century.

The invention of the radio in the 1920s provided the next great leap forward. Modern advertising in the USA started with the extensive radio programme sponsorship employed by the tobacco industry. Minister of Health Dr Fenton Ferguson would have had his work cut out for him if he had to face the barrage of smoker advertisements in those early days.

We were obviously meant to be brainwashed into thinking that “Happy faces come with Four Aces”, “Pall Mall guards against throat scratch”, while at every opportunity a serious radio voice intoned, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.”

With the coming of television in the 1940s to 50s, advertising became more sophisticated and technology-driven, keeping pace with the explosion in print media and radio advertising that had occurred during the first half of the century.

Today’s world-class local advertising agencies serve up a proper balance of the best of Jamaican personalities, voices, actors, and presentations, a panorama of broad-based themes and scenes where skin colour is not an issue.

This was not always the case. In 1956, Ford (Kingston Industrial Garage) was offering us “five great cars, the Prefect, Anglia, Consul, Zephyr and Zodiac.” “The Anglia,” said the ad, was “at home in Jamaica”, and the advertisement featured a pretty girl dangling her legs against the bonnet of the car.

A pretty good sales message, but now, note well that all those pretty girls in all the printed advertisements of the day were all white or of light complexion. White was considered the colour of choice to promote your product. This must have had to do with buying power, a clear indication of who was at the top of the economic and social ladder.

It took a while to break the colour barrier in advertising. Not only in this field, but in professions such as banking, sales, and management where certain jobs that interfaced with certain segments of the public were reserved for light-skinned or brown-complexioned persons. But that’s another story.

Jamaica’s advertising also had its great leap forward when radio advertising commenced on July 9, 1950, with the first commercial station, Radio Jamaica and the Re-diffusion Network, taking to the airwaves. However, we had to wait until 1963 when JBC-TV was launched to get our first taste of television advertising. Who can forget Grace Kennedy’s popular slogan, “What a great way Grace taste”?

But we were no ‘hurry come-ups’, as we were in the print media business from 1718 when Jamaica’s first newspaper, the Weekly Jamaica Courant, began operating on Church Street, Kingston. The Courant accepted advertising and posted government notices, shipping news, and prices of goods.

But the most macabre advertising ever done in Jamaica were the ads for slave auctions, and the capture of runaway slaves. When a slave ship was due to arrive, posters advertising auctions would be placed around town and notices in the local newspapers would advertise the potential sales. Slaves were expensive, because slavery was so central to the economy. It has been estimated that the average price of a slave was £20 in 1709, rising to £50 in 1750 and £100 in 1800.

An example of the numerous slave ads reads: “To be sold on May 29 (1790), on board the ship Nancy, 300 choice young Coromantee, Fantee and Ashantee blacks.”

Another ad printed in the Courant on October 26, 1726, reads: “Runaway, a slim Coromantee wench named Sarah with a large suckling child, and a mark WT on her right shoulder. Whoever brings her in will be rewarded with ten shillings. Likewise for a young bay horse.”

This was a grim period in Jamaica’s history, with the advertising of the day reflecting the callousness and evil nature of the slave trade that epitomised in the worst way man’s inhumanity to man. I hope Sarah grew up to be a strong Maroon warrior.

Such was the power of advertising then, as it is now. Buy one an’ yuh boun’ fi swim.

Lance Neita is a public relations and communications specialist. Comments to the Observer, or lanceneita@hotmail.com