Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (review)

In recent years gifted scholars, including Jackson Lears and Pamela Laird, have vastly expanded historical knowledge of American advertising, and there are numerous books on marketing products outdoors. When first opening Buyways, I did not expect to learn much new. But this inspired book was a revelation, packed with fresh information and penetrating analysis.

Catherine Gudis analyzes outdoor advertising from the Civil War to the present. In the nineteenth century, "bill posting" was chaotic, totally unregulated, and marked by incessant conflicts in which workers regularly tore down and replaced rivals' posters before the paste was dry. Gudis recounts that overenthusiastic advertisers even slapped posters on corpses of dead horses while they were still warm! Late-nineteenth-century cities were slathered with paper billboards featuring written text.

With the advent of the auto, and with Americans moving faster, advertisers began attracting consumers with visual symbols and logos more than with text. Although there were early opponents of outdoor advertising, the industry attempted self-regulation, and it enhanced its image by patriotic postings during World War I. Between the wars it became firmly entrenched. Gudis highlights the key role played by outdoor advertising in "promoting and commercializing a traditional theme in American mythology: the promise of social, geographical, physical, economic, and even spiritual mobility" (p. 64)

With improved highways and higher automobile speeds, advertisers simplified and streamlined messages. Unlike appeals in magazines, roadside messages had to inform motorists instantaneously. Gudis presents an illuminating analysis of the differences between outdoor and print media. She also describes ingenious three-dimensional outdoor displays of products and outdoor sign parks, where viewers were encouraged to linger and products were displayed behind glass. Gudis astutely traces connections between outdoor advertising, the emergence of strip development, and urban sprawl.

Emerging opposition to outdoor advertising entailed gender conflict: "The soldiers of the 'billboard war' pitted the beauty of nature against the beast of commerce, and usually women against men" (p. 163). There was major conflict over who owned "public space," the area between private property and the eyes of potential consumers in automobiles. Female reformers learned that soft-sell opposition and reliance on public opinion and popular pressure worked better than legal confrontations with outdoor advertisers, but Gudis notes that Ladybird Johnson's much-heralded "Highway Beautification Act" of 1965 was basically a sellout to outdoor advertising lobbyists. Gudis concludes with a brief examination of recent trends, including the use of irony, the emergence of enormous signs, and the parallels between outdoor advertising and the information superhighway.

Buyways is a superb book. Gudis mined primary sources and made excellent use of previous scholarship. Space limitations prevent me from mentioning more than a handful of the insights that permeate her graceful, persuasive writing. Finding flaws seems like nit-picking, but nevertheless there are some. When tracing the changing use of visual imagery, Gudis discusses the manipulative power of film in the 1930s and what advertisers learned from it. Specific examples would have been useful here. In several places, this reader would like to have been exposed to more numbers regarding the growth of outdoor advertising vis-à-vis other media, and some economic analysis of the profitability of the industry. These minor caveats reflect more the preferences of the reviewer than substantive flaws. Physically the book is beautifully crafted, as befits its subject, and Gudis has made a welcome and highly significant scholarly contribution.