About
About Us
The Museum of Advertising (MoA) offers a uniquely compelling exploration of the ways in which advertising has reflected and shaped American culture, from 19th-century postcards to 21st-century digital media. The MoA also celebrates Cincinnati’s unique role in the birth, growth, and current reshaping of the advertising and marketing industry. In fact, we envision more than just a website to visit: we see this site as an accessible, always-on storytelling lab, built on user participation and contribution. We hope that hundreds--or thousands--of “digital curators” will help contribute, shape, and refine the stories and learnings the MoA will display online now, and in an offline brick-and-mortar MoA in the future. Learn more and contribute.
Advertising has come a long way since the Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages and wall posters. It is now a $400 billion global industry, still growing, yet also undergoing radical transformation and redefinition. Importantly, advertising is a powerful window through which to understand, appreciate, and critique business, society, art and popular culture–a reality evident in the growing popularity of the award-winning show Mad Men.
How did the idea of a Museum of Advertising take root? Two years ago, one of our founders, Pete Blackshaw, put a video on YouTube, featuring his father talking about his own experience in the advertising industry with BBDO in the 1960s. View here. Pete's father passed away months later; but the video triggered a broader, still-continuing conversation among friends, former colleagues, and industry experts about all aspects of the advertising industry. From that, a group came together in Cincinnati and asked: Why not take this conversation to the next level, and keep it going? After all, there are thousands of campaigns, stories, and experiences to unpack, starting here in Cincinnati--and so this initiative was born.
SImply put, the goal of the Museum of Advertising is to celebrate those stories, to unpack the meaning of advertising in our society and culture, and to shape and inspire the next chapter in advertising. We look forward to your participation.
Here's a link to one of the first stories written about the advertising museum initiative.
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