Before Your Flexible Friend

Sources

These adverts were collected from many sources. Some were bought as paper ephemera; many were copied from digital scans of magazines. In particular, the TV Times scans came from cheekydog1 on eBay, whose DVDs are well worth a look for anyone doing similar research.

Want to see every advert at once? Try the Advert Archive.

1972 (pre-launch)

A pre-launch advert describing the forthcoming Access card, appealing to merchants to accept the new way of paying. Supplied by Stew Mills.

1972–73

Some of the very first Access credit card adverts.

1974

1976

Note that the card number on the cards in these adverts now starts 5224 rather than 4987. This shows a switch to the Master Charge (“The Interbank Card”) numbering scheme, long before the MasterCard symbol started to appear on the cards.

1977

Unlike the preceding years, when new adverts appeared regularly, this “cooker” advert seems to have been repeated throughout much of 1977. It’s almost as if they were working on something bigger… much bigger!