Other SP advertising

 In the preceding post to this one, I showed a number of examples of Southern Pacific’s versions of “institutional advertising,” which is advertising of the company rather than creating demand for its products (since only a rather small fraction of the audience in mass-circulation magazines is in a position to select the service). Here’s a link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/05/sps-public-advertising.html .

In the present post I want to give some examples of much more directed advertising, that is, directed at customers. I will start with examples from the introduction of SP’s new piggyback service, which though graphically resembling the institutional ads shown in the preceding post, nevertheless certainly pitched SP’s ability to move freight on the road and on the rails.

SP also distributed brochures to actual customers, presumably a far more relevant and potentially responsive audience. Below is the cover of one such brochure. The interior described train times and delivery service via the SP subsidiary, Pacific Motor Trucking (PMT). This brochure, obviously, does not show the creative handiwork of Foote, Cone & Belding, SP’s ad agency in the 1950s, who did make the ad shown above. You can click on the image below to enlarge it if you wish.

Another component of the SP service was its perishable shipping via Pacific Fruit Express. PFE distributed brochures at various times, publicizing newsworthy events like the delivery of a new class of refrigerator cars. They also distributed brochures about service. I show one such brochure below, which though it publicizes a PFE service, carries only the emblem of SP, since the El Paso facility was on SP rails, though of course PFE was jointly owned by SP and UP.

Below is the outside of the brochure; it was folded along the vertical center line to make the brochure. Thus what you see below is the brochure front at right, and the back at left.

The interior likewise would have shown the vertical fold, with the photo of the El Paso ice deck extending the full width of the brochure inside pages. There is additional interesting material in this brochure, that I would like to discuss in a future post. For now, it’s advertising by an SP subsidiary.

Both these brochures, about piggyback and icing service, inform customers, but they are quite different than the “institutional” ad at the top of this post, and those shown in the preceding post. Obviously SP, like any railroad, needed to keep its customer, present and possible future ones, informed about capabilities, and like the institutional ones, clearly show railroad priorities.

Tony Thompson