It started at a World's Fair. Almost everything started at a World's Fair.

​

Every brand you recognize. Every highway you drive. Every theme park you've visited. Every skyscraper you've looked up at. Somewhere in their history is a World's Fair.

For 130 years, American expositions were the most powerful marketing platform ever created — temporary cities of extraordinary ambition where inventors demonstrated technologies no one knew they needed, companies launched brands that became household names, and 320 million people encountered the future before it arrived.

Milton Hershey discovered chocolate at a Chicago fair. The Ford Mustang debuted in Queens. Nylon was introduced at the 1939 World of Tomorrow. Futurama predicted the American highway system seventeen years before Eisenhower built it. The fair that lost $121 million in New Orleans left behind a convention center that has generated $90 billion.

World Fairs in the United States created jobs, established a national identity, branded corporations, and gave birth to experiential marketing 100 years before Madison Avenue even thought of the name.

Expositions and World's Fairs in the United States: The Branding of America is the untold story of how America learned to sell itself — and how the brands, technologies, and cities those fairs created are still with us today.

​