ABSTRACT
The changed locations and relationships between buyers and sellers in the age of mass advertising and the automobile meant that advertisers, architects, merchants, and manufacturers had to develop techniques geared toward mobility. Trademarks and brand names had facilitated the job of advertisers in their project of “salesmanship in print” by providing simple and identifiable imagery with which to represent nationally distributed goods. The strategies of “picturization” that outdoor advertisers employed to advertise to mobile audiences without much use of text (described in a previous chapter as an aesthetics of speed) functioned to reorient viewers visually so that they could quickly recognize an abstract, massed, and iconic form as representing a product without much more than a side-window glance.1
