Mick Scott with Leonard W. Lanfranco's assistance, opened the museum in 1986. Homer P. Groening,
Matt Groening's father, was also one of the founding directors of the museum. It opened on June 26 of that year in the Erickson Saloon building and was initiated by the Portland Advertising Federation. At the time it was the only museum in the world devoted solely to advertising. In 1996, the museum moved to a location in Portland's
Old Town Chinatown neighborhood. The
PBS show
Antiques Roadshow featured the museum in a 1999 episode. In 2000, the
William F. Eisner Museum of Advertising & Design museum opened in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the AAM was no longer the only museum to focus exclusively on advertising. The AAM relocated to Portland's Chinatown district in 2001. In 2003, the HMH ad agency won an
ADDY award for their design for the museum's stationery. By February 2004 the Eisner Museum had acquired the American Advertising Museum collections as an exchange for paying its debts, However, the Eisner Museum in turn closed in 2010, when the building it was located in was sold. , the disposition of the museum's collection and archives is unknown. ==Features==