The Power of Advertising: Burma-Shave

This online exhibit, from the William F. Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, focuses on the famous Burma-Shave ad campaign of the 1920s and 30s. The company used series of road signs painted with rhyming limericks to catch the attention of motorists. Each series of signs ended with the words "Burma-Shave." This ad campaign elevated the company from near obscurity to the #2 brushless shaving cream in the country.

I find the museum's website atrocious. For a museum focused on design, one would think that good design would matter, but it seems like the site is concerned with aesthetics only and not usability. One of the most frustrating features of the site is the lack of an overall navigation bar. Once you click to a page, you have to use the back button to get back to where you were and there is no way to navigate easily through sections.

There also doesn't appear to be a direct link to the exhibit itself. Only to the page listing all of the museum's current online exhibits.

Collection Principles
Kitsch seems to be the overwhelming theme here. As it doesn't appear to have much if any scholarly value, the principles guiding the collection don't seem to be that strict. It seems that the exhibit uses whatever information it has available.

Object Characteristics The site opens in a tiny window from the link on the exhibit page. There is an animated introduction that seems like it should include music, but it doesn't. This flashy info provides a dramatic intro to the Burma-Shave phenomenon while in the left vertical bar, text from the different signs appears. After the introduction, the user has three pages to choose from. The first is a text description of the history of Burma-Shave, the second is a collection of audio and video, and the third is a collection of images. The audio is actors reading the old Burma-Shave ads and is frankly a bit disturbing. I don't see much value in this section of the exhibit. The video links open the tiniest boxes I have ever seen and feel a lot like a VH1 behind the music. There are some still images intertwined with interviews and some reenactments of people using Burma-Shave or coming up with great ideas about how to market Burma-Shave. The image section is rather standard. The images are of course small and can't be resized.

Metadata
There isn't a lot of metadata associated with the site. The images are captioned with a year and what the item is. The audio section explains who the speakers are. The video section doesn't have a lot of information. The interviewees' names are superimposed on the screen, but there is no information about the reenactments.

Audience
As previously mentioned, this is not an academic resource. It is a light exhibit created for the general public. I see it as a way for people to reminisce about their experiences with the campaign and enthrall younger generations with the wonder of the red signs.