ABSTRACT
In the densely populated cities of the late nineteenth century, outdoor advertisers had found ample audiences of pedestrians, carriages, and trolleys for their painted walls and posted billboards. Yet each decade of the twentieth century was increasingly characterized by rising automobile use, urban traffic congestion, and the suburbanization of both the upper and middle classes. Especially in the decades following World War I, huge increases in automobile ownership, nationally distributed goods, and highway construction reshaped American travel, settlement, and shopping patterns as well as the perception of the urban landscape. The automobile had turned America into a “nation on wheels.” At an annual conference of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America in 1929, one billboard operator characterized the changes. “People have become physically and mentally restless,” he said. “They have developed the habit of being on the go from place to place. To-day one room in most American families is outdoors. It is the family car. In it the members of the family go hurrying up and down the country”1
Almost immediately, the outdoor advertising industry set out to package and sell these new automobile travelers by turning ordinary drivers into a mass mobile audience. Henry Ford’s assembly line had rationalized the production of automobiles, allowing wage earners and middle-class white-collar workers alike the luxury of automotive independence. Likewise, the outdoor advertising industry strove to produce and package the heterogeneous mass of people as a commodity for sale to interested advertisers. That is to say, the commodity sold by outdoor advertisers was the attention of a great new audience, the motoring public. The decades around the turn of the century are often viewed with respect to America’s shift from a production-oriented ethos to a con-
sumer culture and from fears of scarcity to an embrace of plenty.2 But critical emphasis on consumerism and mass consumption too frequently skates over this fact: consumers are produced commodities. 3
With every coming year, automobiles could be found in more and more places, thus expanding the marketing frontier and potential location of billboard spaces to areas heretofore untouched. Yet for outdoor advertisers this growth was not enough. The industry looked not merely to follow automobility trends but to augment and propagate them. After all, the more mobile the motorist, the more advertisements he would pass, often repeatedly and sometimes daily. If outdoor advertisers could actually encourage the practices of automobility, the value of the industry would soar.4 One 1928 Foster and Kleiser Company advertisement for the billboard industry illustrated this point (fig. 9). Using an authoritative quote from President Calvin Coolidge, it depicts the engines of industry churning out masses of identical packages. Yet left ambiguous in the image is whether the billboards are producing the goods or if they are producing the hordes of stick-figure audiences lined up and standing at rapt attention, mass consumers who are the commodities ready for distribution and sale.5
