Past Sales: The Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design

The Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design isn't entirely virtual.  It has a physical space in Milwaukee that houses a collection, but it also has a series of digital exhibits featuring online-only content.  It's this component of the Eisner that I'll explore.

There are five virtual exhibits featured on the Eisner's website, all dealing with different methods and genres of advertisement.  Be sure to check them all out:

Hikifuda looks at how Japanese illustrated advertisements were developed and changed over time.  The content is engaging, especially since marketing historians often ignore non-Western influences, and the images are high quality.  The exhibit is a little static, however, and you have to navigate through some annoying music.

The exhibit on Boris Artzybasheff looks at how this Russian illustrator contributed to both advertising and magazine deisgn.  There's plenty of good interpretation to be found, and the images are superb, but the presentation is not very interactive.

The Art of the Album Cover is much different from the previous two exhibits.  It's set up as if you were playing a record - in order to view album covers from different decades, you have to move a turntable arm around.  While viewing these covers you can also listen to music from that era (or you can mute the sound).  My only complaint is that the quality of the album cover images isn't great.

The Power of Advertising:  Burma Shave tells the story of a clever marketing campaign from the 1920s. In order to understand just what the makers of Burma Shave were trying to accomplish, this exhibit lets you listen to audio clips, view images of roadside signs and see the product's old packaging.  And if you linger on the main screen long enough, you'll be able to cycle through the rhyming jingles that formed the backbone of these ads.

The final exhibit is A New Set of Wheels, which shows how car advertisements evolved and adapted to different media.  Using interactive timelines, you can see how cars changed through the years and how they were presented in prints ads.  You can also view a few TV spots for the Volkswagen Beetle, and you can play around with 3D images of a few classic cars.  There's such a wealth of information and images that you could easily loose track of time while marveling over old cars.

I would definitely recommend taking the time to view all these exhibits.  Their subject matter is incredibly diverse, yet taken together they provide an interesting narrative of the history of advertising.  Despite some limitations, you can learn a lot, and if you're in the Milwaukee area you should check out the Eisner's physical counterpart.

The Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design
Mission:  The Eisner is an interactive educational center focusing on advertising and design, and their impact on our culture:  honor and lend recognition to past achievements within the scope of advertising and design; foster public awareness of the influential role of advertising and design on society; serve as an educational resource for advertising and design students and professionals and the community at large.  With its unique emphasis on the social, historical and aesthetic implications of advertising and design, the Eisner museum is an important center for research on and discussion of advertising and design.
Website:  www.eisnermuseum.org/exhibits/online.shtm