The History of
The History of
The History of
Introduction
In a primitive form, advertising has been around almost as long as Homo sapiens in
a recognizably modern form. It has been around for almost 2500 years. Despite its
venerable age it is still sprightly growing. Moreover there are good reasons to believe
that its usefulness to consumer and therefore to economics, will keep on growing for
another century or two at the very least. Even the dumbest futurologists would not try to
predict further ahead than that, so I rest my case in advertising being a far larger and
more important global industry in AD 2099 than in AD 1999 Advertising can be
looked at from various perspectives. As the quote above states, its purpose
is to increase the number of articles or products sold. These are not only
things we can buy in different stores, for example clothing or supplies for our
daily life, but also such simple things as a message placed by an institution
or organization asking for attention of the public to raise money or to make
them aware of a problem, such as anti-smoking ads. Even political parties
use advertisements and commercials to state the
opinion of their candidate. I think we have all experienced that quite
extensively during the presidential campaign in the United States.
During 19th century the majority of advertisements were published in the newspapers
and advertising leaflets. Although newspapers were a prerogative of well-off class of
community but the situation began to change in the early 1860’s when people got the
opportunity of receiving publications by post. First magazine advertisements appeared
in The Southern Messenger. For a few years the editor of this magazine was
Edgar Po. Many of the magazines that began to publish advertisements as the
separate charter in the 19th century have continued doing it nowadays. Such editions
are Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, Readers Digest and some others. Despite of
the popular brands of newspapers the majority of information in the advertisements was
unreliable and apocryphal. Moreover advertisements sometimes were immoral and
absurd. For example in the country side of one American city advertisement was placed
in the monument of a non-existent person and it stated: “This person killed himself
with the handgun with Colt system”. Then “publishers” enumerated the value
of this handgun. As the result of such inhuman actions people stopped trusting
advertisements and began to consider advertising as something negative.
The first radio-advertisement was broadcast in 1922 in New York on the WEAF radio
station. Thus in the 1920s advertisers and their agents had come to realize
radio's possibilities. W ith its drama and immediacy, radio could convey their
message directly to the consumer who would not need to purchase
a publication or even need to be literate.
In the 1950s television was introduced and quickly developed into THE
advertising-media. In the 1950’s common income from the advertising industry rose
to $10 billion a year. In 1980’s this index was $ 100 billion! Now advertisers could
demonstrate the use of their products and present well-known figures to praise it. They
could also affect emotions through television.