Common barn advertisers include local
roadside attractions, restaurants, and
chewing tobacco manufacturers. The
Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company is credited with popularizing the medium. The company began advertising their products on the sides of buildings in 1890. By 1925, they had moved to advertising on
Mail Pouch Barns. At the program's height in the early 1960s, some 20,000 barns in 22 states displayed Mail Pouch advertising, In the early 1940s,
Clark Byers painted barns and their roofs for
Rock City near
Chattanooga, Tennessee, often with messages promising travelers the chance to see seven states from atop
Lookout Mountain. Byers painted advertisements for the attraction on over 900 barn roofs in 19 states. More recently,
Bob Evans Restaurants painted barns in
Indiana and
Illinois in a style identical to their billboards, until 2001. The restaurant chain later painted some barns with the
Italian tricolor to advertise their pasta dishes.
Frisch's Big Boy also advertised on barns at one point. From 1997 to 2002, the
Ohio Bicentennial Committee commissioned
Scott Hagan to paint 101 barns, including one in each
county, with the committee's logo and colors. One was destroyed by a tornado shortly after its painting and was replaced. A few have since been torn down or repainted. The painted barns celebrated the state's 200th anniversary in 2003. Each barn took about 18 hours of labor and of paint. Enthusiasts traveled from across the state to watch Hagan paint the barns. An estimated one million people saw at least one of the barns. Since 2009, Hagan has also been commissioned to paint barns with
anti-tobacco and
breast cancer awareness messages in
West Virginia. ==Regulation==