At the beginning of the automobile era in America marketing and advertising focused on the need to convince consumers that these new-fangled conveyances were roadworthy. Print advertisements mostly emphasized the mechanicals of the motorcar as well as its  reliability. By the 1930s, particularly with the rise of General Motors and the ethos of planned obsolescence, keeping the customer wanting “the next new thing” was being aggressively pushed by marketing executives. Indeed, two of the most important individuals in the early marketing of the automobile had Dayton connections: Ned Jordan and Richard Grant and we’ll speak to their contributions. Within the advertising field its long been a given that consumerist behavior is highly influenced by desires for personal identification and social status. As such most automobile marketing over time has focused on cars as desirable objects but with important subthemes related to the family unit, class status, the desire for travel, economic success and upward mobility, celebrity, feminism, and sexuality. In this seminar we’ll illustrate all of these themes through the viewing of actual print and motion picture marketing placements.