The
Pontiac GTO Digital History Project
Site Review
IntroductionHomepageScopeSite MapRationaleSite ReviewTechnical Plan
Code 87-F: Windward Blue |
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There are a number of innovative websites that mirror what I hope to accomplish with my website. While most of the advertising databases-archives, and there are many, that I will review here cover larger subjects or greater time periods than I have chosen to do, I would nevertheless borrow ideas of layout and presentation from many. There are also a number of illustrated narrative essays that I would follow in form for my essay. The sites I reviewed for my project include the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, The Showroom of Automotive History, the Center for Interactive Advertising’s Volkswagen Gallery, The Walter P. Chrysler Museum’s Chrysler Heritage site, the Library of Congress’ “Posters from the WPA” site, The Commercial Closet, Richard Wright’s illustrated web-essay on automobile advertising in the 1940s and 1950s, and the "Muscle Car Club." Each of the mentioned websites does an admirable job of covering their subjects.
For my advertising database, there are a number of examples that I have examined and chosen to review. Ultimately, of course, I hoped to gain some idea of what is possible in an ad database and I also hoped to find ideas about layout that I could “borrow” from. There was only one website that I could find that ventured into the narrow territory I wanted to cover, namely, automobile advertising that contained anything close to an interpretation or that presented a cultural argument. It was a website, the Center for Interactive Advertising’s Volkswagen Gallery dedicated to ad designer Helmut Krone of the Doyle, Dane & Bernbach advertising agency, and it had a section on his work with the Volkswagen Beetle.
This was an interesting website overall, simple and well laid out, in fact, it was “cool.” It was an archive of ads developed by Mr. Krone and was not exclusively about his VW ad campaign but also included his work with Avis. Navigating through the site was simple, with an index on the left border with links to short narrative essays and then galleries that contained small jpegs of the various advertisements in question. There was no new media in this site.
In their exploration of the VW ads they focus on what was at the time a truly novel advertising campaign that played on the uniqueness of the Beetle. My site would closely mirror this aspect of the Volkswagen Gallery. An important difference between my site and this one, however, is that the VW corporate management approved this ad campaign whereas Pontiac’s ad agency snuck through their unique GTO ads, under the corporate “noses” of GM, to reach their target audience.
The site contained a brief narrative with limited illustrations and the ad “gallery” displayed a total of eight of Krone’s unique ads. Unfortunately only the first ad is presented in sufficient size to read the ad’s copy narrative, the other seven are simply small jpegs and the visitor cannot read the copy; you only see the ad’s main illustration. Although, in a way, the ads speak for themselves, I would hope to add a brief interpretive caption to each ad in my database. Ultimately this section of their website could have been done in print with little effort. The site also only covers a representative sample of VW ads but not a full run, which I would hope that my database would be similar in form and design. Otherwise, though, this is a unique and worthy website that I would use some elements of in mine.
The Henry Ford Museum’s “Showroom of Automotive History” is an interesting site as well. They have a limited collection of what they call “Featured Automobiles” that covers a single year for six different types of automobiles: the 1896 Quadricycle, the 1896 Duryea, the Model T, the 1932 Ford V8, the 1936-37 Cord, the 1948 Tucker, the 1949 Ford, the 1965 Mustang, and the 1986 Ford Taurus. Clicking on one of these, the visitor is taken to a well laid out page that presents a number of choices. There is a narrative history and links to pages of photos of the car, specifications, advertising and another on sales literature. The latter two were of special interest and would be an important part of my database. They used a table with three rows and three columns with a small icon in the center of each cell that the visitor may click on. I would probably set up something similar for my site. The site, however, is limited in its coverage as it examines only single car models in a single year. There is no interpretation of the advertisements nor are the complete run of advertisments available here. Other car models do not have the sales literature available either. Nevertheless, a member of the “general public” as well as an automotive scholar would find something of interest here although it is by no means a comprehensive site on automotive history.
The Walter P. Chrylser Museum’s “Chrysler Heritage” site is another interesting site dedicated to the history of the automobile. In this instance, however, a visitor is overwhelmed with choices, with navigation links littering the index page. It took some time to determine what all was included. It is generally an archive site that covers the Museum’s collection. It includes a chronology-timeline that could prove to be a model for my timeline, and dozens of articles on various aspects of the history of the automobile in general and Chrysler in particular. The majority of the articles and information, however, are presented in “pdf” format, which was a limiting factor in that there was little interaction and no multi-media. Nevertheless their section of the “People” of Chrysler was interactive and a model of design. Frustratingly though the back button would not work once the “People” section was accessed. Unfortunately there was no advertising database and the only material listed after using the search function to locate “advertising” within the site were “pdf” articles of which most were simply text without illustrations. As in the Henry Ford Museum site, quite logically, the target audience for this site is the general public or scholars interested in Chrysler and/or the automobile. Overall, it was comprehensive and fairly well designed, as one might expect from a well-funded organization but, in my opinion, the Henry Ford Museum site was the better of the two.
The next site I visited was the Library of Congress’ “By the People – For the People – Posters From the WPA, 1936-1943.” This site was strictly an archive containing 908 “boldly colored and graphically diverse” posters created by the WPA. There was no interpretation of the individual posters but a narrative essay is included that places these posters and the WPA in historical context. The site design was excellent, navigation straight forward, and contained some new media consisting of interviews with a WPA artist. A visitor could search the site by keyword or browse by subject or artist, a useful function and one that I might borrow for my database. The posters selected for this collection were organized around themes, such as health, travel and World War II. The visitor then clicked on one of the choices and was then presented with examples of posters in small scale, with the only information included with each being the artist’s name, the name of the poster, and accession data. One could click on the individual images to access a version of the poster in higher definition. Overall this proved to be a very interesting website, well designed, logically laid out, and was a pleasure to visit.
The next site I visited was the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History’s “Ad * Access” site. I had visited this site earlier in the semester during the “Archives/research” assignment and as I noted in the class blog then, it was an “elegant” site. Its purpose is stated in the first line of narrative on their index page. The database contains over 7,000 advertisements from all genres dating from 1911 to 1955. They are divided into five subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II. It was, in fact, not too dissimilar to the Library of Congress’ site, and one could browse at leisure through their advertising database or by subject or search by keyword. As I noted in the blog, “The main index buttons includes links to timelines (not interactive, unfortunately but a minor criticism), a comprehensive search engine, the ad database directly, technological information, and an FAQ. Also included are short historical narratives that can act as a decent guide to the various time periods covered by the database. The timelines also can act as a shorter guide. . .Each of the over 7,000 ads in the database appears first as a large thumbnail with access links to higher resolution jpegs (up to 150 dpi). Each ad page has descriptive listings below the ad itself that list the date of publication, where they appeared, etc. and a list of the various sub-categories of the database the ad appears in. You access each ad from either the browser link or by searching the database.” If given the time, my database would be organized in much the same way and their search engine would be another model. Their section on copyright issues too proved to be of interest and would guide my approach to this issue.
There was also the rather daring website called The Commercial Closet that examines current advertisements to determine if they have a gay content and if so rates them as to being gay friendly, gay neutral, or gay bashing. There is no objectivity here. There is a section for viewer participation and it also includes a description and detailed notation regarding all pertinent background, such as the ad agency that developed the ad, who it was developed for, when it appeared and in what regions of the country/world, and who its target audience was. Here is the limit of information that I could possibly include in my database. The site was well laid out and highly interactive. I would hope to add this much detail to each of my ads, but I’m not sure if I would have the time in one semester to add that much information!
Jim Wangers, the advertising executive who played an integral part of developing the GTO ad campaign, has his own website "Pontiac's Great Wide-Track Era." I add it here because I have attempted to contact him via email and by letter (but have not heard back from him yet). The site is a Flash-based site that takes the visitor on a trip through what he called the “Wide Track” era, which was a Pontiac advertising campaign that began in 1959—it referred to a technological innovation that Pontiac developed (and is one of the points of my arguments regarding U.S. auto manufacturers and technological innovation in the 1950s and 1960s) – whereby Pontiac created a series of cars that were wider and longer than their competition and this made for better handling and a more stable and comfortable ride. The website is a promotional advertisement for his new book but also contains a great deal of information regarding Pontiac during the 1959 to 1969 time period. It follows a couple as they travel to a Pontiac dealership in 1969 to buy a GTO and then go on a bit of a history trip from 1959 back to 1969. It’s a bit on the campy side (I definitely would not include a running soundtrack on my site as he does but that’s a matter of opinion) but the site does cover the era through Mr. Wangers’ eyes and is therefore of interest. Automotive and advertising historians would find it as a valuable resource as would anyone interested in cars of this period.
The final database/archive I visited was one constructed by a muscle car enthusiast: the “Muscle Car Club”. This site was elegant in its simplicity and was well designed and easy to navigate. It contained a wealth of objective information and illustrations of classic, muscle, and import cars from all eras and it was free of any academic pretensions. If one wanted to get the straight scoop on the performance, specifications, sales figures, options, photographs and even some advertisements of any muscle car of the 1960s and early 1970s (or classic, import or whatever), this would be the place to start.
I next explored Professor Richard Wright’s illustrated narrative for “Detroit News” on a new exhibit at the Detroit Public Library on automotive artwork and its impact on the auto industry in the post-World War II years. Produced in color, the ads he used to illustrate his article add a stimulating look and feel to what otherwise would be a straight narrative. I corresponded with Professor Wright via email and asked him about working in an electronic format and asked him about the pitfalls, difficulties and benefits of this medium. He noted it was fairly easy when you have the assistance of the Detroit News, where he had worked as the automotive editor before accepting a position at Wayne State as an Assistant Professor of Journalism. He is also the author of an E-book: ”West of Laramie – A Brief History of the Auto Industry”; published by Wayne State University Press
Of interest is this passage on the use of his book:
Richard A. Wright owns the copyright to West of Laramie, but it may be used in whole or in part without payment. Jenny King owns the photographs and gives permission for their use. We ask only that you let them know if you have used all or any part of the book by emailing them at Wayne State University.
In his reply to me, he noted that “I found that working in the field of automotive history on the Internet was a very reasonable and useful approach. Your project sounds very feasible. Good luck with it.” Brief, perhaps, but to the point!
Overall, these websites were all well designed, with excellent navigation, source material, content and presentation. To conclude, I would combine some factors of each of these websites for my proposal. Specifically, I would use the ad format of the Commercial Closet, Showroom of Automotive History, WPA and Ad*Access sites for my advertising database. I would borrow heavily from the sections on advertising and sales literature within the latter site as well but I would also add a hotlink over each photo such as used on the CNMH’s ad website that opens a window over specific sections of the ad to highlight some point germane to the author’s argument (if I can get some technical help in using Flash and any other relevant software). I would also use select examples from the database to illustrate my narrative, having hotlinks from the illustrations used in my narrative back to the ad database so that a reader could go between the narrative and the ad database to gather more information about that particular ad. My narrative section, which would contain my arguments, would be based on Richard Wright’s illustrated narrative. My timeline would be based in part on the timeline within the Walter P. Chrylser Museum’s “Chrysler Heritage” site but would contain hotlinks to other material, primarily the images of individual ads, sales brochures, or order forms.
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Proposal Introduction - Project Scope - Site Map - Rationale - Site Review - Technical Plan