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When you where out and about today did you see a billboard? Chances are that you did. Ironically there are less of them today than in their heyday, the 50's. Billboards and automobile travel are a marriage. As people spent more time in their cars it simply made sense to advertise to a captive audience. It doesn't take much imagination to understand the concept of advertising as a means to promote a business. In a sense the first the first form of advertising was a billboard of sorts. In a row of similar buildings a craftsman needed a way to direct his customers to him. A sign with a shoe painted on it immediately identified that storefront as the cobbler. An enterprising fish market may have a carved wooden mackerel hung on chains, swimming in the breeze, above the door. This worked just fine for a long time. But if a business didn't lend itself to such universally recognizable symbols or space became limited a new form of advertising emerged. Off site advertising. May it be hand bills, posted notes or in newsprint. The genie was out of the bottle. Savvy businessmen soon realized the power of reaching out beyond their neighborhoods. The various manifestations of advertising could fill a book. Radio, TV, direct mailings, the Internet, newspapers, sky writing and those annoying slips of paper under your windshield wiper. One form however seems to stand alone as uniquely American. The billboard. They are larger than life, sometimes annoying, sometimes clever, but most importantly, in your face. The effectiveness of billboards is dubious. In the beginning it was less so. Mostly because the landscape was less busy and traveling by car was still an adventure. Probably the most famous billboards of that era was the Burma Shave ads. These signs where posted on rural roads in a series of five separate signs. Each parceling out a fragment of a witty jingle. The signs where spaced at 50' intervals, allowing the driver and his passengers to read and hold the thought. The last sign simply stated "Burma-Shave". It was a smashing success and there where over 1,500 of these pickets. Many bon mots where supplied by the customers themselves. Here is a sample of three of this amazing collection.
**************** These where limited to a time and place when land was 'loaned' to the advertiser. After the war two factors conspired to doom this folksy approach. Land issues and the interstate highway system. Higher speeds and more competition demanded bigger billboards with a more succinct message. In fact billboards took on a standard size, 12 feet high by 25 feet wide. A backlash to billboards congealed in the mid 60's. The growing awareness of the environment as fragile and finite and Lady Bird Johnson's 'American Beautification' campaigne targeted billboards as a public enemy. Undoubtedly many billboards where removed. However the argument was flawed. The fact is, not many billboards despoiled the land. And certainly the pristine areas of America had no billboards in the first place. Who would finance advertising for a Mercedes Benz to farmers plying the roads at 12 MPH
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