News

Excerpt from January 2008 Monthly Memo pdf.

Greenlee School graduate student's project attracts national attention

By Erin O'Gara

Photo by Eloisa Perez-Lozano

Patti Brown, a graduate student in the Greenlee School recently completed a research project on the history and use of political campaign bumper stickers for Assistant Professor Jay Newell's Advertising Effectiveness Seminar course JlMC 598A.

Brown's project: "Driving Political Opinion: Presidential Campaign Bumper Stickers" traced the history of the earliest campaign bumper stickers and the changes that we have seen in their frequency and use over time. As part of the project, she created a blog documenting her research and a model displaying old bumper stickers. The model consists of two Ford bumpers bolted together and showcases more than 60 stickers tracing all the way back to former U.S. President Herbert Hoover.

The idea for the bumper sticker project came to Brown after someone removed one from her car on the Iowa State campus. She immediately began paying more attention to bumper stickers that she saw and the way that they branded the candidate they were advertising.

During her research, Brown traced the first bumper stickers back to a silk-screen printer named Forest P. Gill in 1946 and was able to meet with Mark Gilman, chairman of Gill Studios, Inc. and tour the company’s Kansas City location.

National news networks including CSPAN and various radio stations have interviewed Brown on her project and she has been profiled in The Chronicle of Higher Education. To visit her blog, please go to: http://bumpertobumper.squarespace.com/