Billboard Series

Buyways by Catherine Gudis, 2004, Excerpts

The cooperative spirit between government and business during WWI also directed attention to the construction of highways, which was greatly aided by the passage of the Federal Aid to Roads Acts of 1916 and 1921. This, of course, was a godsend to outdoor advertising. Outdoor advertisers were among those for whom automobility spelled prosperity.

The car had expanded the stock and trade of the outdoor advertising industry, the mobile market. The mobile market now consisted of a mass of wage earners and every other upwardly striving group. Outdoor advertisers claimed that billboards appealed to both the “masses” and the “classes,” “a select clientele of everyone who passes.” The job of the advertisers was to capitalize on the culture of mobility as well as its attendant national mythology of the democratic and open road.

Unlike any other form of advertising, the benefits of billboards accrued with the mobility of the audience. The more these audiences traveled the more advertisements they passed. Though the industry began to register the special benefits of addressing an audience in motion, it still had not found ways to calibrate the meaning of circulation figures. Besides identifying the circulation patterns and figures of their mobile audiences, somehow the industry also had to package their audiences in a way useful to their clients.

Federal Aid Road Act of 1956

After World War II, when highway construction and, notably, plans for a national system of interstate and defense highways resumed, reform efforts also returned. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Road Act of 1956, authorizing a 41,000-mile system of highways, 90 per cent of which would be funded by; the federal government, and 10 percent by the states, at an estimated cost of $25 billion. Envisioned as a modern, safe, and efficient solution to roadways that had long been ill equipped to accommodate the swollen ranks of motoring Americans, the system was comprised of limited-access, high-speed expressways built according to uniform design standards.