“Hooray, it’s Sunday!”
The ad opens with a child’s shout. In the yard of a Western-style house with a garden, Dad waters the flowerbed with a hose and his daughter with a watering can. Then comes Mom’s voice: “Whenever Sunday rolls around, Dad and the kids make a big fuss about helping me with my chores. And I thank them with Ottogi Curry.” Dad peers into the hose and gets a face full of water, and the whole family doubles over laughing. Then everyone gathers around the table to eat curry as a song plays: “Sunday is Ottogi Curry Day.”
Western-Style Houses, Gardens, and Home Appliances
This is a family you see again and again in 1970s advertising. They live in a Western-style house with a yard, there is a refrigerator and a television inside, and on weekends the whole family sits down together at one table. Along with rapid economic growth, a new kind of family took shape in the cities: a salaried husband, a wife who ran the household, and two or three children. This young middle-class family was the new customer advertising had in its sights.
Back then, school and work went on even on Saturdays. Sunday was the only day the whole family could be together, and Sunday became another word for family. From its very first TV commercial, Ottogi seized on exactly that Sunday. The ads ran before and after weekend children’s programs, a time when kids and parents sat in front of the television together.
Ottogi Curry first went on sale on Children’s Day in 1969. Until then, curry was a Western dish you could only taste at pricey Western-style restaurants. Ottogi introduced this unfamiliar food as “the meal a happy family shares on Sunday,” and that is how curry found its way onto Korean family tables.
In truth, few families actually lived in a house like the one in the ad. A Western-style house with a garden was a symbol of affluence that most ordinary households could not reach, and in 1975 fewer than one in ten homes had a refrigerator. Even so, a Seoul Foods Snow Sherbet ad spoke of “happy homes” as the freezer door swung open and children peeked out from behind the ice trays, and Crown Beer showed people relaxing in the garden with a beer fresh out of the refrigerator, saying, “Any time is a good time.”
One study sums up 1970s washing machine ads like this: at first they promised that laundry would get easier, but the machines didn’t sell. So the ads put children and happy families front and center, and began courting the fathers who made the buying decisions. That is how home appliances became the stage set for the “sweet home” young middle-class families dreamed of.
What advertising sold was a packet of curry, a bottle of beer, a box of sherbet, but what people bought was the scene beyond them: Dad laughing in the yard on a Sunday, children gathered in front of the refrigerator, a glass of beer on the dinner table. The ads of the 1970s showed people a happy home that had not yet arrived, and people worked hard to reach it.
Next: 1980s | Korea on the World Stage
