You May Not Be An Old-Fashioned Girl, But You're Gonna Get Dated

One of our features this issue deals with e-commerce, or more specifically, the e-counselor. If you’re the least bit Internet-literate, you know there are sites you can visit to buy promotional products with a mouseclick. Do they work? Well, yeah. Do we recommend them? Well ... there are several facets to the picture. There’s another question about e-commerce that applies to all of us: Will it make the way we now do business obsolete? No. It’ll change it, create new/different competition and affect almost every industry in some way. But ultimately, the Net’s an agent of alteration, not obliteration. Web aficionados might argue differently, but historically, they’d be wrong. Our cover story’s an apt analogy. Calendars have been around for well over a century as promotional products. But as ubiquitous as they are, there were always some crepe-hangers ready to kill them off. Seriously. In 1888, When Edmund Osborne and Thomas Murphy (didn’t know there’d be a history lesson, did you? Pop quiz later) decided to put an artist’s rendition on a calendar along with advertising, some were incredulous: Who wants art on a calendar? And who would ever pay to advertise on one? Within five years, when art ad calendars were booming, people worried the new invention would destroy unadorned calendars, wall or shelf, not to mention desk/pocket calendars/diaries. It didn’t. Both continued to sell, just as they do today. In the early 1930s, Charlie Ward shocked the calendar industry by paying tens of thousands of dollars for the exclusive rights to artists such as Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell, as well as properties like the Dionne quintuplets. When the calendars took off, the same pessimists said the “regular” art calendar was dead. Who’d want one with an unknown artist or subject when you could have Parrish? But the work of semi-anonymous artists and photographers still adorns some of the biggest-selling calendars on the planet. Then came the postwar years. While folks like Rolf Armstrong had been doing “girlie” calendars since the ’20s, a new group of painters – including Alberto Vargas, Earl Moran and most notably Gil Elvgren – took the pin-up calendar to a whole new level. In accordance with the era’s social climate, no male-dominated business – which in the ’40s and ’50s was pretty much every business – was complete without a calendar sporting a sexier-than-life rendition of beautiful women in various stages of undress. In 1954, John Baumgarth produced a nude calendar featuring a young actress named Marilyn Monroe, and the photo pin-up calendar was born. During all this, there were those who fretted that the monstrously in-demand pin-ups would eventually absorb all other calendars. They didn’t. And the political correctness of the ’80s didn’t vanquish pin-up calendars either; it simply made their audience far narrower. And so it went, right through the ’90s. Perpetual calendars didn’t wipe out one-year models. One-page-a-day desktop models didn’t overthrow standard models. And electronic calendars haven’t conquered printed versions. People simply use both. And for each change, there was the business version of a Greek chorus chanting that the current crop was doomed by what was coming. But somehow doomsday never arrived. Calendars are still one of the strongest categories of promotional products. The Internet is going through a lot of the same changes calendars did back then. Right now the Web is very trendy, very now, very 21st Century. And with every new development comes predictions of obsolescence for what came before. But rest assured that like anything else that creates waves in business, things will eventually level out – without washing away the foundations currently in place.