ABSTRACT
While roadside reformers favored beauty over business and usually skirted the financial implications of their choice, the organized outdoor advertising industry fought back. It did not, however, simply assert the opposite, that business should be privileged over beauty. Rather it claimed that both could be had, and that billboards were the ideal way to combine them. To the reformer’s amazement, the outdoor advertising industry began to suggest that it, too, was guardian of the landscape, and moreover that billboards comprised the business of beauty. In printed materials circulated to clients and through efforts of specially organized groups of industry representatives, advertisers conducted a comprehensive public relations campaign. Typically, the industry appropriated select elements of the rhetoric of aesthetics expressed by the roadside reformers and civic beautifiers and used these to its own advantage. Why concede to detractors when one could potentially win them over? The serious investment of time, effort, and money in these campaigns suggest that the industry’s gestures were not superficial. As is so often the case with public relations campaigns, in time the outdoor advertising industry engaged and propagated the very same idealized view of the landscape as its detractors.
