To Market, To Market

The film I watched on the Prelinger Collection was To Market, To Market (Part I) (1942). The short film discusses the use of billboard ads in 1940s Chicago. The narrator likened the movement of people and markets to the powerful, ever changing waters of the tide. In this way, he explained that the movement and patters of people must be charted in order to fully understand consumer power. For this reason, ad companies basically head counted people walking driving, and riding public transportation past their billboards. Their strategy was described as a “scientifically planned 100% poster showing”, where they studied the travel patterns of industry workers and locations of stores, markets and schools to find the most populated areas of Chicago in order to place their billboard ads.

I found this film extremely interesting because it gave a bit of insight to the earliest stages of consumer research. The ad companies use billboards as their information technology to communicate their message to the audience and track the responses by using careful observation. By this form of communicating, companies knew how to best serve their market and keep them informed at all times. Today, billboards can still be seen on city streets and on busy highway stretches, working in the same way to communicate with consumers. There are far easier ways to track results (scanners can count cars and track license plates, whereas employees used to have to jot down license plate numbers and match them to addresses) but the basic form of research and trial and error is the same.

https://archive.org/details/ToMarket1942