Decade

1940s ads

The best ads of the 1940s, from "Careless Talk Costs Lives" and "We Can Do It!" to Smokey Bear and De Beers's "A Diamond Is Forever".

1940–1949Updated 6 October 2026

Advertising in the 1940s

The Second World War runs through the 1940s entries: posters asking civilians to guard their tongues, travel less, mend, share and stay healthy, with the methods of commercial advertising turned to the war effort.

Careless talk was the most crowded theme. Fougasse convinced Britain's Ministry of Information that a joke would work better than a warning, and his Careless Talk Costs Lives cartoons sat Hitler and Göring behind gossiping passengers. In the United States, Someone Talked! used a drowning sailor's accusing finger, and the distiller Seagram lent its name to Loose Lips Might Sink Ships.

Other posters asked people to do less, or to do without. Britain's railways asked Is Your Journey Really Necessary?, the Office of Price Administration put a ghostly Hitler in the passenger seat of anyone who drove alone, and Use It Up – Wear It Out – Make It Do! made mending look patriotic. H. M. Bateman's Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases was measured by the government's own survey, which found that two-thirds of the people it questioned remembered the slogan. Fear and humour work side by side throughout.

Two posters had lives their makers never planned. Abram Games's glamorous Join the ATS was withdrawn after an MP objected in Parliament, and Westinghouse's We Can Do It!, a factory notice meant to hang for two weeks, resurfaced decades later and was relabelled "Rosie".

The war also produced Smokey Bear, created in 1944 to protect wartime timber and now the longest-running public service campaign in American history. As peace returned, commercial lines took over again: Frances Gerety's A Diamond Is Forever for De Beers, Maidenform's "I dreamed" ads, and Raymond Savignac's milk-giving cow for Monsavon.