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|''Burma-Shave''}}
In 1928, a hitherto-unknown shaving cream manufacturer got a clever idea for [[Advertising]] its new product: They put four-line poems, one line at a time, along the roadside on various highways in 4544 of the 48 US states,<ref>MA wasappears to have been deliberately omitted, along with a couple offew sparsely-populated desert states (NM AZ NV). AK and HI attained statehood during the 1928-63 ad campaign, but they were also left out - along with any non-US points.</ref> such that each line was just short enough to read while driving along. The fifth line was almost always the product name: ''Burma-Shave''.<ref>[[Subverted Trope|Subverted]] once: "If you don't know / Whose signs these are / You can't have driven / Very far" (with the last sign, which normally said "Burma-Shave", deliberately omitted.)</ref> There were hundreds of different jingles, plus thousands made up by customers. The first jingles [[Played Straight]] to explain why the product (shaving cream) differed from the conventional cup, soap and brush in widespread use at the time. Once the campaign was familiar, different verses were introduced annually with either road safety themes or clever jokes. The vast majority of the jingles probably insinuated questionable or obscene uses of the product.
As the last of these signs were removed in 1963, a few of the rhymes have passed through time to the point that many people today won't get them. The following would have been a [[Shout-Out]] to Smith Brothers Cough Drops, which showed two bearded men on the box:
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