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  • "This Astounding Car for $1,500":The Year Automobile Advertising Came of Age
  • Rob Schorman

In 1906, a writer declared that it remained an "unsolved problem whether the automobile is to prove a fad like the bicycle, or a lasting factor in the industry of the country." A few years later, concerned with the possibility of overproduction and market saturation, auto executives and other commentators were writing articles for the advertising trade press with titles like "Why Auto Production Must Be Curtailed" and "The Fading of the Automobile Rainbow." Considering that by the early twenty-first century, the United States had a population of nearly 300 million people and an average of 2.1 registered motor vehicles per household, it is difficult to appreciate how uncertain the industry's status seemed in its early years.1 Yet although contemporary observers may not have known it, in many ways by the end of 1908 the foundation stoneswere already in place for a hundred years of automotive economic and cultural preeminence in the United States.2 Two events from that year are well known as harbingers of [End Page 468] the industry's future. In September, General Motors was established, and in October, Ford introduced its Model T to the nation's auto dealers. In time, these developments had a profound impact on American automobile manufacture and management.3

Two other events in the preceding months proved just as significant on the marketing side of the automobile's future. In August 1907, the Calkins & Holden advertising agency launched a striking series of advertisements for Pierce-Arrow with a magazine ad consisting almost entirely of a lush painting by noted illustrator Edward Penfield; and in July 1908, the Lord & Thomas agency initiated a new series of ads for the Chalmers automobile with a prose-heavy, hard-sell advertisement headlined: "This Astounding Car for $1,500." These campaigns provided advertising templates that endured throughout the century and helped fuse the automotive and advertising industries as almost inseparable partners in creating modern American consumer culture. As one writer noted in August 1908: "Automobile advertising is really being developed along with the automobile itself."4

At the time, neither the automobile industry nor the advertising industry had rationalized its organizational or production methods. Both still operated on a reasonably small scale, organized as partnerships or owner-managed firms. The signature strategies of modern marketing—the indirect, implicit seduction by visual images and [End Page 469] the direct sales pitch rooted in consumer psychology and market research—took form somewhat in advance (or at least somewhat independently) of major corporations' demand for marketers' persuasive capabilities. Many commentators have collapsed cause-and-effect and chronology in considering these developments and assigned them all to the 1920s or alternatively, treated the entire period from 1880 to 1930 as a relatively undifferentiated chapter in advertising history. However, breaking down the sequence of events early in the new century provides fresh insights into the sources of advertising innovation, which appear more contingent and underdetermined than many writers have presumed. Analysis of these campaigns demonstrates how early mass marketing began to infiltrate the main arteries of the wider culture, both drawing upon it for meaning and then recirculating its own version of that meaning. In the process, these ads supply another set of lenses through which to view the exuberance and anxieties that characterized Progressive Era America. Analyzing them more appropriately places mass-circulation advertising in a time frame congruent with the development of other forms of commercialized leisure, rituals of public consumption, and modes of spectacle that characterized the first decade of the twentieth century.

To understand the form and content of an advertisement, one must triangulate its position using coordinates based on the ad trade's evolving standards of practice, very particular marketing problems and business needs, and current trends in the wider culture. These forces converged in the first years of the twentieth century in a manner that led advertising innovators such as Earnest Elmo Calkins, originator of the Pierce-Arrow ads, and Claude C. Hopkins, creator of the Chalmers campaign, to develop strategies that transcended the era's more conventional and simplistic formulations and laid the groundwork for...

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