The
Pontiac GTO Digital History Project
Project Rationale
IntroductionHomepageScopeSite MapRationaleSite ReviewTechnical Plan
Code 50-C: Cameo White |
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I first became interested in automobile advertising of the 1960s when I ran across a number of ads at an auto show I went to in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. As I researched further, I found that Pontiac had taken a novel approach in its development of advertising in that they had hired professional artists of note, including Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman, to create these advertisements. So I started collecting the ads and the sales brochures, concentrating of course on the venerable Pontiac GTO, since I could not afford to buy an actual car.
I did not realize that there was a way to combine my interest in these ads and to make them into a scholarly historical study until I took this class and discovered CNMH’s interactive section entitled “Advertisements Online”.Here they laid out a way to study advertisements via a website and suggested what kinds of questions to ask, how to determine what motivated the creators and what the ads say about their target audience and what they may say about the popular culture of that time period. My proposal then would be guided by the suggestions expressed in the CNMH’s website.
Traditional business histories have been done primarily using archives of whatever corporation was under study or from collections at research libraries, as is true with the study of most of the fields of history. Scholars, however, are no longer bound by examining only paper documents. Cultural histories have expanded their source base to include a number of other types of sources, including images and artifacts produced by the culture or society under study. Since this website will be a dual-effort study, that is, it will use the tenets of traditional history along with those of cultural studies, using a variety of source types. What better way to cover all of the varied sources, including large numbers of images, available than to publish them to a website?
Coming to grips with automobile manufacturing, advertising and sales is a must to understand the full impact of this industry on the country’s economy and popular culture. In the 1960s we saw the rise in popularity of the muscle car while in the 1970s fuel economy became a concern and hence the public’s automobile appetite changed. In the 1980s it was the minivan that dominated the market place while the 1990s saw the rise of the Sport Utility Vehicle. Who knows where the market will lead from here on out?
There have been very few studies that have tackled the subject of automobile advertising and its interaction with the popular culture of the time as well as its influence on automobile manufacturing and creating a “desire” for a particular type of automobile. Pamela Laird wrote an article “The Car Without a Single Weakness” and she describes the changing nature of automobile advertising from the turn of the twentieth century through the Great Depression. (1 ) She describes nine ads, all included as illustrations but she was limited in the number of ads she could publish in print. Being able to add as many ads as she would have liked would have only strengthened her argument, but the limitations of print kept her from taking this course.
Since advertisements make up a crucial aspect of my arguments that the young executives at Pontiac purposefully and surreptitiously carried out an inventive ad campaign, circumventing the staid corporate GM management, and to include all of the ads necessary to prove my point would not work in print, I am left with the thought that the only viable option is to publish to the web. This project would be well served by publishing it to a website as it will use dozens of color and black-and-white images and TV advertisements, artifacts that would make it prohibitively expensive to use in a standard print publication. Benefits of publication to a web would also include building an accessible and searchable archive-database that a visitor could explore at will – a feature not easily duplicated in print.
Copyright issues, one of the concerns covered in class lately, are of some concern. I have written to General Motors and to Pontiac as well regarding the use of these ads on my website but have not heard back from them. As noted on Duke University's Ad*Access site, though, a scholar may use the material in their website under “Fair Use”. It is then up to the researcher to abide by copyright law. Therefore I should be able to use scans of these ads since it is strictly for research (read "nonprofit educational purposes"). Nevertheless, their point that "Historians need to recognize that ther is no fixed body of rules but rather a shifting terrain of interpretations of the law" keeps this issue in a confusing realm but their copyright link explains the usage of these images by researchers fully. I would go ahead with the project even if I do not hear back from either Pontiac or GM.
The very nature of my sources and of my argument would be well-served through an electronic medium. Hopefully the use of a wide variety of types of sources would only strengthen my arguments and add interest to a subject that has been woefully under-studied.
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1) Pamela Walker Laird, "'The Car Without A Single Weakness': Early Automobile Advertising," Technology and Culture, Vol. 37, No. 4 (October, 1996), pp. 796-812.
Proposal Introduction - Project Scope - Site Map - Rationale - Site Review - Technical Plan