The Campaign for Engineering: Ohio Northern’s new Engineering Facility

The original Ohio Northern Engineering Building

The engineering program at Ohio Northern University has been outgrowing its current facilities for years. The current facility that houses the engineering facility is the Biggs Engineering building. The Biggs building was finished and dedicated in 1970, and was the first building to be built on campus exclusively for the engineering program. The engineering program was initially housed in the Hill Building at the front of Ohio Northern’s campus. The program moved into the building in 1936, after the building had caught fire and been remodeled twice. After 1953, the university purchased the Ada High School Building after the town had finished construction on a new facility in 1952. The 18 classroom building required extensive renovations to the heating and sanitation systems in order for it to actually be usable as an academic facility. The program was housed in this building for almost 20 years before the construction and dedication of the Biggs building.

The engineering college at Ohio Northern has been housed in Biggs since 1972. Over the years, the building has gone through expansions and reorganizations in order to make roo
m for growing program sizes as well as the addition of departments such as computer science. The main expansion done to the building occurred with the addition of the science annex connecting the Biggs Engineering Building with the Meyer Hall for the Sciences. This added on a large lecture hall, computer labs and offices for the heads of the electrical and mechanical engineering departments. The addition freed up space for new classroom space as well as a student lounge for use by the engineering students. However, the engineering programs have outgrown their current facilities in the Biggs building.

The Biggs Engineering Building and current home of the
college of engineering.

Space in the Biggs Engineering Building has gotten quite cramped with the constant expansion of the engineering departments. The space in the building has gotten so limited that some of the engineering clubs have been moved into the basement of the building. The Baja club has moved their component storage and half of their work area into the basement of the building, along with the storage for the human powered vehicle team. The aero design team has been confined to the corner of a room that is meant to serve as a common area for all engineering students. The common rooms of the college have also lately been subdivided in order to make room for the senior capstone projects being constructed in the spring semester. The teams that do actually have their own space also do not have enough room. The concrete canoe team is limited to a hallway that is between a lab and the computer and technology offices. The hallway itself is barely wide and long enough for the canoe to be housed, let alone for the cables used as a framework in the canoe to be tensioned to the appropriate force safely.

The new engineering building concept. 

With all of this in mind, the university has acquired funding for the construction of a new facility. The new facility has been designed and modeled based on input from the current students as well as projections for the growth of the programs housed in the building. Fundraising for the new building began after the plans for the new building were approved by the administration of the university. The building has been projected to cost approximately 30 million dollars, and consist of enough space to house all of the clubs and associations safely. The building design is also meant to incorporate concepts that current students and studies about academic spaces alike believe the current facilities are missing. The main thing the architects have incorporated into the new b
uilding is the presence of open spaces and an abundance of windows. The new building also incorporates an open air atrium, and three floors of classroom space and faculty offices. The new building also eliminate hallways and replaces them with collaborative spaces consisting of seating areas and whiteboards for students to work with one another. The new building will serve as a collaborative and open space for future engineering students to obtain an education as well as encourage cross disciplinary work in engineering groups. The building will begin construction in the summer of 2018, and will become the official engineering facility for the engineering department.

Pinterest: A Useful Tool for Sales

Pinterest in another example of one of the many social media platforms that have gained popularity with the millennial generation. The purpose of Pinterest is a visual interface that links ideas for things such as crafts and recipes. The app consists of a “feed” that is populated with images that are linked to posts or webpages made by other users. When a post interests a user, they can “pin” it to a board on their personal page. The “pin” serves as a way of getting to the article or page that either provides the steps for the idea, or sells the item the pin is created to display. These boards on one’s page serve as a way of organizing the pins that they find interesting into categories that make sense to them. These boards can also be made private, public or collaborators can be allowed access to the board to also post pins from their own feed. The users are also able to create their own posts based on things they have done or written about to post to the Pinterest feed. These posts can be found by other users through the tags attached to the post that they create. These posts are then featured both on their personal profile as well as broadcast onto the feed for others to view and potentially pin to their own boards. Pinterest is essentially meant to share information of virtually any topic through the use of a graphic and a brief caption. It also allows users to curate their information for easy access at a later date.

This social media platform is a very effective way for businesses to advertise and sell their products. The platform was essentially made for the selling of goods through the “pins” that are used to portray them. Like every other platform, there is a proper and efficient way to generate effective profiles for the selling of goods. Jason McDonald provides several effective ways to build an effective Pinterest page for the marketing of your goods and ideas. One such tip is the tracking of items that are pinned from any particular website. Entering the URL of a website into the search function of Pinterest allows you to pull up all of the pins put out by a particular vendor. This comes in handy for business owners who are trying to track what from their official sites is making it onto Pinterest. This allows for companies to adjust their inventory or advertising potentially on items that are being pinned from their websites.

Another helpful hint that McDonald provides for the construction of a successful Pinterest page is to reverse engineer large company’s pages to see what types of posts are working best for their products. This way the company reverse engineering profiles will be able to create pins for products that are similar to ones that they also sell. Mimicking the pins that were successful for a similar product is a good strategy for getting your product out for people to see. These two hints serve as a good means of creating a heavily trafficked Pinterest page for the marketing of a company’s goods and ideas. These ideas carry over on several social media platforms, and are incredibly important tools for becoming a presence on social media.

Building from the Ground Up: The Tale of the ISAC Capstone Project

You may be asking yourself "What is a capstone project, and who the h@$l is Isac?!" after reading the title of this blog. Well let's start from the very beginning. a capstone project is a large-scale project is assigned to a group of senior students as a prerequisite for graduation. The project is most often proposed either through a fellow student or an outside company. The project is meant to encompass all the techniques and strategies taught over the students' years in their college program. The purpose of the project is to prepare students to work in the industries they will most likely be employed within to give them some brief experience to the workings of a project schedule. The project is also a good opportunity to put a final polish on the skills that students were supposed to have obtained over their college careers. With that clarified, let me explain where the name ISAC came from. ISAC stands for the Interdisciplinary Stage Automation Capstone. It is the team name attached to my mechanical engineering capstone project at Ohio Northern University. This blog is a brief run through of the workings and results of the project determining whether I graduate with my degree in May of this year.

Freed Center for the Performing Arts Facade

The project first began as a proposal submitted to the college of engineering by the lead technical director of the Freed Center for Performing Arts here at Ohio Northern University. The project proposed the design and construction of some sort of automated system capable of pulling scenery across the main stage and the studio theater of the facility. The reason such a system was desired was to create fluid and precise movements for large and heavy pieces of scenery often used in theatrical performances. The system would also add safety to the movement of these sets by eliminating the need for stagehands to generate the movement, as well as provide a smooth motion for any actors that may be riding on top of the sets.

Main Stage of the Freed Center, where the project will
be used the most often.

The project was ultimately approved to be assigned by the college of engineering. The college then polled students as to which projects they would like to work on, and assigned students to projects according to their interests. Three mechanical engineers (including myself) and two electrical engineers were assigned this project during the fall semester of 2017. Once the project was assigned to our team, we immediately began gathering data for the project. We researched competitive systems to what we were expected to design, interviewed a technician who works on these systems professionally and began to compile a list of the basic system components needed for the system. Once we felt we had a decent grasp on the ins and outs of the system we were to design, we began to generate possible solutions to the Freed Center’s problems. This involve the creation of three solutions as per the requirements of the capstone course the project was assigned through. The three solutions all had the same general configuration, but involved the use of different motors as well as speed reduction techniques from the motor to the drum that would ultimately spool the cable.

The three-dimensional model created of the proposed system.

These three solutions were then compared to one another using ranking techniques taught to us in the engineering curriculum. An ultimate solution was chosen, and defended in front of engineering faculty in an engineering review board. The solution chosen consisted of an electric motor coupled with a mechanical brake and a speed reducing gearbox. The output of the gearbox was then attached to a shaft to spin the cable drum to pull the scenery across the stage. The general design was ultimately well-like, but needed a great deal of refining. Calculations were done to ensure a motor and speed reduction were adequate to withstand the loading and desired speed specified by the customer. Once specifications were finally established through rigorous calculations, a final design and three-dimensional model of the proposed system was generated. Once again, a project review board was assembled to review our solution and the component specifications we had calculated. Once the solution was approved for assembly, then the parts quoted for the proposed design were ordered using money allocated to us by the customer.

Final assembled system used in testing.

The mechanical components
and enclosure side by side.

Construction of the system began immediately once the components arrived. The mechanical components were all unpackaged and tested individually to ensure they were not broken, and that they all functioned as specified by the orders we made. Once the components were verified, the motor, brake, and gear reduction were mated together to form one unit. The enclosure for the entire system was then constructed according to measurements taken from the component specification sheets, and validated on the physical components. Once the enclosure was completed, the mechanical components were placed within it and leveled to ensure no premature wearing of components. Once the mechanical assembly was constructed, it was linked to the “brain” of the system constructed by the electrical engineers on the project. The programming and electrical components control the output and functionality of the motor in order to create the movements desired by the Freed Center. A user-friendly interface was also created in order to make the system relatively intuitive to use once it was installed on site.
Once all of the systems were linked, the system was brought on site to the customer for testing. This is the current status of the project as the team works to optimize and fine tune the workings of the system. The video embedded in this blog (also viewable here) shows the setup used for the testing of the system. The system was rigged as it would be for use in a show on the main stage of the Freed Center. The maximum load was then applied to the system in order to test the functionality of the mechanical and electrical systems. Some problems were experienced in terms of the height of the cable used to generate the movement from the stage floor, as well as the accuracy of the moving of the scenery. These are all issues that will be corrected through further testing of the system over the next two weeks. The finishing touches such as paint, cleaner wiring connections and component packaging will also be taking place in the next few weeks as the project comes to a close. The project was an overall rewarding experience to showcase my abilities I have gained through my schooling at Ohio Northern. Hopefully the system we have created will reliably be serving the Freed Center for years to come.

A Free Online Catalog: The Usefulness of Instagram to Small Businesses

Instagram is another social media platform that has been released during my lifetime in hopes of provoking the sharing of information with whomever you want. The app is an offshoot of the Facebook social media Goliath, and has become incredibly popular as a result of its association with its big brother. The two platforms are linked in the sense that posts made on Instagram are able to be posted on one’s Facebook wall with the click of a button, and that the sale of items on Instagram can be linked to a more robust page created on Facebook. The main purpose of Instagram is to provide a

platform that allows for the sharing of images and videos to provide an image of one’s self that can be view-able to the greater public. The videos and images are able to be edited and filtered through the app in order to produce images that are to the user’s liking. Now with all of this emphasis on pictures, it is kind of hard to believe that this platform would be useful for a business. It brings to mind the age old saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words”.

Companies have been taking to Instagram in hopes of reaching their customer base through as many channels as they possibly can. Everybody from Chrysler to United Airlines have created business profiles on which to place images and videos to showcase the products and services they offer. All of these companies have had to dial in to the types of posts that will get the best reaction with the crowd they were attempting to draw. This is a concept that Jason McDonald addresses in his Social Media Marketing Workbook. The concept is outlined in what I believe to be the most important section of the chapter involving Instagram. The section that mentions this principle is the “Reverse Engineering” of existing profiles for a business new to the platform. McDonald recommends that a small business should take advantage of the dos and don’ts that have been discovered by much larger companies with more resources to commit to advertising. A small boutique in Nebraska trying to branch out onto the web isn’t going to be able to commit hundreds of man hours to advertising campaigns like Patagonia or Vera Bradley. Looking at successful posts from large or corporate competitors provides a mold for a small business owner to follow in order to always get a reaction from their target audience. The author then provides steps to create profiles for a company from the basic choosing of a profile picture to the steps to creating a post. However, another important aspect of Instagram is the ability for it to serve as a product catalog for a company. Images of a company’s products are able to be posted on the page in a manner that makes them appear desirable as well as be accompanied by a caption describing the item and its pricing. Third party vendors such as “Like to buy” also allow for links to be placed within the images of this “catalog”. These links then take the Instagram user to the company’s web page so they are able to learn more about the product and possibly purchase it. There is a great deal of potential for Instagram to serve as a valuable media outlet for small business to reach their target audiences.

Scientific Journals: Engineering’s Connection to the Outside World

Magazines are the main public exposure for engineers.

There are not a lot of ways for engineers to communicate their research and findings to the outside world. If your work isn’t mentioned in a periodical such as Motor Trend or other trending magazines then the odds are pretty great that it will not reach the eyes of the common reader. As a sort of trade-off, professional journals and publications have been started as a means of allowing engineers to get their research and findings out into print. This serves both as a means of sharing one’s findings in hopes that others will attempt to recreate and validate your results. The publishing of one’s results also serves as a sort of academic claim on your work. Tracking publication dates is one of the best ways to determine the origin of an idea or process so that credit can be correctly assigned for any benefit that may result from the work or research in the report. A journal article is not the same as a patent, but it at least gives an indication of where an idea originated from.

Writing an article for a scientific journal is sometimes regarded as one of the hardest parts of conducting engineering research. With topics as complex as thermodynamic processes and the regulation of heat transfer, it is often hard to put the use or analysis these concepts to print. An engineer writing a journal article must walk a fine line between being technical and communicating on a common literary level. The journal article that an engineer writes must be written simply enough that anybody could pick it up and read through it without getting a headache from technical jargon and complex formulas. However, the report must also contain enough information that an outside professional would be capable of reproducing your work in order to validate your findings. As you can see, this is a double edged sword for the writer. Attempting to walk this fine line is often what makes the writing of articles for publication such a daunting task for engineers. Boards of editors exist for these publications in order to assist engineers with the writing process, but the process most often takes several iterations before a report is deemed acceptable to be released to the public.

I am familiar with the struggle that is associated with attempting to get a paper into circulation because I too am attempting to get my work out to the public. I am currently in the process of writing a paper based on my capstone project for the American Society for Engineering Education. The society holds regional conferences e

The American Society for Engineering Education provides
an outlet for young engineers to share their work and research.

very year in order to provide engineering students of every discipline to display their projects and research for peer review and professional presentation. The conference requires that teams apply for a spot in the conference through the submission of an abstract of the project. The abstract serves as a general outline that states the purpose of the project and include few technical details in order to draw attention to the rest of the article. Once the abstract for the group has been approved, a paper must be drafted for review. A board of editors is assigned to review the drafts and suggest changes to be made before the submittal of the final draft. Once the final draft has been submitted, it is once again reviewed and placed into print for the conference. The conference then consists of a series of presentations about the projects that are featured in the lineup. The publications for each of the regional conferences are also published as a national publication for distribution both in print and online. However, the board is very particular as to what they expect to be in a paper before they publish it. There is only one review through the association, but that review often results in a laundry list of things to fix in order for the paper to ultimately be approved. Once the final draft is submitted, it is still possible for a paper to be denied publication if it is believed to be not written to the liking of the board. So between making sure all of your data and processes are documented, making sure your report is easily readable and appeasing a board of engineers and editors there is a lot associated with getting one’s work to a public platform. However, there is a lot at stake as well if your research or project is in a highly competitive field such as engineering. The first one to publish is often the one who gets the credit. It’s sort of like a more civilized and bland version of the hunger games, and the odds are usually never in your favor.

Senioritis and Stress: A Memoir of a College Senior

Attending college has become the norm for young adults as they graduate high school. It serves as a sort of transition into the real world from the sheltered life you had while living with your parents. College is supposed to be a time of personal growth and development. You refine and hone in on your interests and work towards degrees and certifications that will allow you to turn those interests into a career for yourself. Colleges like to boast about the rankings of their academic programs, the events and programs that its students are involved in and communicate and overall sense of togetherness and happiness as you make the transition to adult life over your four (or more) year tenure at a university. However, there is a whole other side to the college experience that tends to get left out of the college brochures and propaganda. Colleges don’t mention the stress and strain that is associated with the process of obtaining a degree. There will be long nights of practicing and memorizing facts and figures to later put to paper in an exam, countless hours of completing seemingly impossible projects and above all the ever looming stress of trying to keep your GPA at an acceptable level. There are days where you will feel like you’ll never be able to get your degree. However, getting beaten up and knocked down is all a part of the experience. After serving out three and a half years of my sentence at my university, I thought the stress would finally begin to melt away, and a great deal of the academic pressure has. However, an entire new kind of stress has taken its place.

As a senior in college you will finally begin to be able to reap the benefits of the last three years of hard work that you have endured. You can schedule classes that have easier course load, and fill the general education requirements that you have been putting off until the last minute. The class load does become easier and more endurable, but there are several aspects to senior year that bring an entirely new type of stress to the party. Senior projects, job hunting, graduation application, housing and student loan payments are all phenomena that begin to close in on college students once senior year comes around. The stress and strain that college has put on people has even been recognized medically. Psychology today reports in an article written on the subject that in 2013 57 percent of women and 40 percent of men in college programs have reported episodes of anxiety to the point that their ability to function is hindered. The article also points out that cases of stress related mental illness or strain have skyrocketed since the phenomena was beginning to be documented in 1985. Events such as the shooting at Virginia tech have been linked to the stress associated with attending college. “Mental health concerns pertain directly to episodes of violence”.

Now I am not trying to say that college is going to drive you to insanity or depression. As a matter of fact, my personal college experience has been the most rewarding experience of my life. However, as the final semester of my college experience begins to come to a close, I can’t help but feel the pressures of life in the real world begin to sink in. It is the time of year where every graduating senior is awaiting replies from companies whom they have applied for positions at. Many times a company will not even tell you whether you are still in the pool for a position that they have available. This period of your college career is sort of an odd limbo stage between life at school and life in the outside world. You no longer want to be at school because you’ve taken your required courses, your senior projects or thesis are beginning to come to a close and your just waiting to hear back from the outside world if there’s some place for you to go after graduation. Whether you should start looking for a place to live, buy furniture for whatever home or apartment you find, start paying off your student loans and begin to build an adult life for yourself. This waiting game can make the stress that you experienced in class feel like it was nothing. I’m ready to be out of college, but I suppose that I have to wait for the world to be ready for me.

Safety at Sea: The Safety Precautions of Ocean Liners

It is the time of year when college students begin to flock to southern tourist destinations in order to have a little bit of fun after grinding through their spring semester mid-terms. That’s right ladies and gentlemen. I’m talking about spring break. There have been dozens of films and television shows that have focused their plot on the so called craziness and antics that go on when college students vacation during this period of time. However, I had never partaken in any spring break trips until this year. As a college senior, I decided to finally break the trend and take a cruise with several of my friends. Now cruising was not a new concept to me. I had been on four other trips such as this one beforehand, so I figured I pretty much knew the ins and outs of life on a ship. However, there was something about this ship that made me pay more attention during the mandatory safety drills and lectures before we left port.

Carnival Triumph

The ship we were on board was the Carnival Triumph. Now usually I have full faith in the operation and maintenance of a ship when I board, but this ship had a bit of a history. In February of 2013 the Triumph set sail for a routine cruise in the Caribbean. However, tragedy struck when an engine fire crippled the ship in open sea out of quick reach of support from dry land. The passengers and crew were then stranded on powerless cruise ship without bathroom facilities, electricity, clean water, and means of preparing food. The passengers were stuck in horrid conditions on board for nearly a week in an ordeal that was nicknamed the “poop cruise” by periodicals such as business insider . The conditions became so poor on board

Carnival Triumph Lobby as I saw it.

 that the interior of the ship had to essentially be gutted and disinfected in order for it to pass regulations once again. Now after this all had happened the ship had been brought up to code to ensure that another engine fire would not cripple the ship. I knew it was safe, but there were other things weighing on my mind.

The main reason that I paid close attention to the safety drills that were being held on board was due to the Costa Concordia disaster. The Costa Concordia was an Italian luxury liner that mainly did cruises in the Mediterranean Sea. It was heralded as one of the most glamorous and luxurious ships on the sea at the time.

Lobby of the Concordia before the sinking.

It towered over the ocean with thirteen decks of suites, restaurants, casinos and swimming pools to accommodate the 3780 passengers that were able to be comfortably housed within. The ship was on a routine voyage from the port of Rome Italy. During one of the nights spent at sea, the ship ran aground during the dinner portion of the evening. Passengers reported a violent shaking of the ship as a hole over 100 feet long was torn into the engine room. The flooding of the engine room resulted in a total loss of propulsion power as well as electrical power. Passengers were quickly assembled at the muster stations that they were shown before the ship left port. However, an abandon ship was not

Costa Concordia as passengers evacuate.

issued until an hour after the ship had run aground, despite the fact that the ship was listing steeply to the side of the impact. The evacuation of the passengers also took painstakingly longer than is required by law. Maritime law states that passengers and crew are to be evacuated off of the ship within a half hour of the abandon ship command. Instead, it took six hours for the final lifeboat to leave the Costa Concordia. Although the lifeboats were deployed, many were still trapped on board the ship as is continued to lean and eventually came to rest on its side near the coast of the island that it had hit.

Lobby of the Concordia after the Sinking.

The tragedy only killed 32 people out of the nearly 5000 people that were on board thanks to the well-organized way in which emergency evacuations are outlined for such a case. So as I stood on the deck of the Triumph alongside the lifeboats, I made sure to pay a little extra attention to where my emergency station was.

A Guide to LinkedIn: The Professional Platform

LinkedIn has been considered the professional social media platform available for use by the public. The platform functions in a way that is incredibly similar to Facebook. The similarities being that each user constructs a profile for themselves. However, the profile that you build for yourself on LinkedIn serves more as a virtual resume for online recruiters and other professionals. The service acts as a way to broadcast your skills as a professional in a compact and discrete manner due to the fact that the user is in control of who is capable of viewing their information. LinkedIn also allows for the user to network with recruiters and fellow professionals in order to build relationships and reputations in a professional sense. With all of this power, LinkedIn can seem pretty intimidating to the standard user. However, there are several “self-
help” books that will hold your hand through the process of creating an effective profile. The “Social Media Marketing Workbook” is an example that provides a lot of step by step advice that, on top of the interactive guidelines already built into LinkedIn, will help an inexperienced user to create a successful profile. 

Jason McDonald first begins his tutorial on LinkedIn by describing its structure much like I have already done. He goes through the general outline of the site including the influence of personal profiles, business pages and the news and social feed that are all featured on the platform. After this brief introduction of the site, he begins to provide advice on the actual construction of your profile. He provides advice for what to use when filling out the standard questions during profile creations such as your personal summary, your work experience and your education. Once the general setup of the account is outlined, he goes into what I believe is the most important function of LinkedIn. The connections that you make with others.

Connections on LinkedIn are incredibly similar to the friend requests that are received on the Facebook platform. There are two types of connections on Linked in, first level and second level. A first level contact is somebody who accepts a request to connect that has been sent by you. A second level contact is somebody who is a first level contact of one of your first level contacts. The book goes on to state that interacting with your first level connections is one of the best ways to reap the benefits of LinkedIn. Posting material that is not only interesting to you, but also to your connections is a great way to build a professional relationship. LinkedIn also allows for you to tag connections in your posts to ensure that it appears on their feed, and increase the likelihood of them actually reading and commenting on what you have put on your feed. Another effective way that I have personally had a great deal of success with is the messaging capability that is built into the platform. This service allows for discrete communication to either one or a group of individuals without it being broadcast out onto the feed. This is a great way to privately discuss job prospects, information exchanges or even just chit chat in a professional manner with the connections that you have made. I would strongly recommend utilizing this tool as a means of bettering existing relationships that you have already made with connections on LinkedIn. These connections could end up flourishing into a lasting contact in industry, a potential job offer, help with resume and profile building or even something as simple as asking permission to contact them outside of LinkedIn.

The book also offers tips on how to interact with second level connections that you have made on the site. The interaction between a profile and a second level connection is very limited. The only real way to interact with a person on the platform is for them to become a first level connection. I personally have just always sent an invitation to connect with people who were second level connections, however the book suggests a different approach. The book recommends first doing a key-word search for the person you wish to connect with. This search will display through which first level connection you and this person are connected. The book then suggests that you request that this first level connection introduce you to the second level connection you are interested in. This consists of a personal message to the person that it essentially sent on your behalf through your first level connection. While this does seem like a more formal way of connecting, I personally think it is a lot of steps for something you could easily do with a personalized connection request. The book continues to outline the other features of LinkedIn in relative detail, but I believe that the most useful section is the outline of how to manage your connections. After all, your connections are your main resource for information and introduction on this platform, and they may be hiring.

Advertising in the Auto Industry: It’s PR for Cars!

Print ad from the 1930's

The automotive industry has been one of the cornerstones of the American economy since Ford began rolling Model T’s off of its assembly lines in the 1920’s. However, once other automakers began to move in on the market, the need for advertising became crucial to the success of automakers. The three American automotive giants that we know today survived because of their aggressive use of advertising campaigns. Even today, one can’t watch television or listen to the radio without hearing some sort of advertisement for a car or truck that has just been released. With a near constant market of people wanting to buy cars, it’s not so surprising that these companies are constantly battling each other to be the first one to get their product in front of the eyes of the public. And they do so through public relations and marketing departments that work nearly twenty-four seven to generate ads that will make you want their product.

Print ad from the 1950's 

Aggressive advertising campaigns from car companies are not a new phenomenon. Advertisements for car companies really took off with the success of the personal radio. With print ads now not being the only way for companies to reach the public, ads for Ford, Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac, images of their products placed on a screen right in their homes. Soon images of the “space race” era cars that we now consider to be icons were seen on every major television network, and companies were battling for peak time slots in order to get their product in front of as many eyes as they could. The radio and television media outlets dominated the advertising campaigns of the auto industry for decades. However, that all changed in the 2000’s with the introduction of the internet.
and Chrysler flooded the airwaves in hopes of appealing to the masses. It was the success of these
campaigns that kept these major manufacturers going through the great depression and both of the world wars. However, after world war two, a game changer nearly as influential as the radio came into play. The television soon became the best way for companies to not only stimulate the ears of the public, but also their eyes with

Advertising today for the auto industry has become a multi-billion dollar industry due to all of the possible outlets companies are capable of using to reach their target audiences. With the introduction of the internet to the masses in the early 2000’s, advertisements could now be broadcast across a whole new network that was never previously accessible. Also, with the internet came the invention of social media. Automakers quickly jumped on this opportunity to broadcast out images and advertisements on any platform possible. Today every major car company can be found on any social media outlet. From Instagram to LinkedIn, these companies have established a mass following through the use of clever advertisements, vibrant pictures and other marketing and PR

Print ad from 2018.

tricks to get people to follow them on these platforms. Also, automobile advertisements have strayed from the technical and wordy ads of the past. Today's ads are made to be more sleek and even humorous to the viewer. This is evident in ads from companies such as Audi and their "roar to life" ad. With the world’s worth of information available today in the palm of your hand, car companies have spent millions to get their products to show up wherever you may be looking. They have found ways to appear in magazines, newspapers, televisions, computers, and even your cell phones. These companies have transformed themselves into massive public relations and advertising firms along with being among the industry leaders in car manufacturing. With all of this work being done to get their products in front of us in every way possible, what method will they come up with next to get their products in our minds?