The First Social Media Platform Was a Bumper Sticker

This past weekend I was at the Order of Willard lunch at the Texas Association of Magicians convention in Houston, listening to Gay Blackstone share stories about her late husband, Harry Blackstone Jr. A perhaps little known fact (though it is documented through books and videos) is that before Harry became one of the most famous illusionists in the world, one if his jobs was working for LBJ in communications. Gay asked him once what that job actually consisted of, day to day.

Harry’s answer: Mostly putting bumper stickers on cars.

Gay laughed and said that was the early version of social media! As she kept talking, I was playing that statement back in my mind. The more I sat with it, the more I thought it was a great way to explain how marketing principles are the same, even when the vehicle or channel changes and evolves.

The idea isn’t new. The tools are.

Here’s what a bumper sticker and a social post have in common: you put a message on something (a car or a digital platform), that something moves through the world, and strangers see it. A campaign bumper sticker on a car in a grocery store parking lot could be seen by hundreds of people in a single afternoon. Multiply that by every car with a sticker, every parking lot, every stoplight, and you’ve got a message traveling through a community without lifting a finger after the sticker went on.

That’s reach. And reach is not a new invention. People have been trying to get their message in front of as many eyes as possible for as long as there have been messages and eyes. What we call social media didn’t invent the concept. It just built a much faster, much cheaper delivery system for it.

So what did change?

Two things, and they’re the two things that actually matter for your business.

Engagement. A bumper sticker is a one way message. It has a statement and a point of view (POV), but it can’t respond, adjust, or have a conversation. Social media gave us a way to talk back and forth with the people who see our message. Someone can comment, ask a question, share it with a friend, or tell you flat out that you got it wrong. It’s where real relationship building happens.

Targeting. You can’t always choose which cars end up with your bumper sticker. Harry might have handed them to a person and hoped they put it on a car, or he might have put them on a car that ended up not going very many places. He could only hope the right people ended up with one on their bumper. Today you have much better controls and the ability to get your message in front of your exact audience instead of hoping thousands of random passersby happen to include your people.

Here’s what hasn’t changed

You can still put your message out in a bunch of places, years ago it was cars, today it is platforms. But the quantity of message delivery is never as good as the quality of where you put your message. Visibility still comes down to the same basics: showing up in the right places, in front of the right people, and doing it consistently enough that you’re not just a one-time glance. A single post, like a single bumper sticker, rarely does much on its own. It’s the repetition, on the right platforms, in front of the right audience, that turns a stranger’s glance into recognition.

What this means for your marketing

If the story of bumper stickers teaches us anything, it’s that the tools will keep changing. Bumper stickers gave way to social feeds, which will give way to whatever comes next. That next seems to be AI search, but time will tell. What doesn’t change is the actual job: showing up consistently, in front of the right people, with something worth their attention.

For Fun:

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