Advertising is dated back to the Christian Era. One of the first known methods of advertising was outdoor signs, they would be painted on the wall of a building and were usually very eye catching. Archaeologists have found signs in the ruins of ancient Rome and Pompeii.
Advertising as we know it today began during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. If an advertising agent working on the account of a product such as Quaker Oats cereal in about 1900 were to have been transported forward in time to 1925, the challenges, choices, and risks he faced would have been in many respects familiar. If the same agent had been transported backward to 1875, that could not be said. Advertising agencies were relatively unknown then, and those that existed had ill-defined responsibilities. The mix of products for which they were placing advertisements was quite different from that on the market at the turn of the century. Quaker Oats itself had not yet been invented. Thus, the history of advertising in America falls into two eras separated at about this turning point.
To begin with, we should define advertising. It is mass communication an advertiser pays for in order to convince a certain segment of the public to adopt ideas or take actions of benefit to the advertiser. During the past century, large American manufacturers have played a leading role in developing this craft, but in earlier years, leadership in terms of design and creativity lay elsewhere.
In the eighteenth century, Great Britain boasted the most advanced advertising. Handbills and trade cards proclaiming in extravagant terms the excellence of sundry products and services were common. Among the items being sold, few if any caused more excitement than the New World itself. Signs and handbills touting its wonders were so ubiquitous in London that Richard Hofstadter has observed that America was conceived amidst "one of the first concerted and sustained advertising campaigns in the history of the modern world." Daniel J. Boorstin believes that such promotion may have had a significant impact on the speed of emigration and has wondered about the impact on American civilization of the fact that "there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe advertising."
Advertising was a well-established practice in the late colonial and early national periods in America, but these advertisements were neither as appealing to the eye nor as cleverly crafted as were their counterparts in England. The type was so illegible that Benjamin Franklin observed: "If you should ever have any secrets that you wish to be well kept, get them printed in [the] papers." Moreover, the United States was a predominantly rural nation. Its farmers may not have been totally self-sufficient, but they produced more of their own food, clothing, and household items than did urbanites. Thus, more Americans focused on production for survival than on consumption for pleasure. With a sparse, predominantly rural population and without an efficient system of transportation and communication, the country had neither the need for nor the means of concerted national advertising campaigns.
Most advertising during the early national and antebellum periods was repetitious and unimaginative. Writing of the pioneer merchants on the middle border, historian Lewis Atherton observed that "in general the early advertising was dreary, matter of fact reading, served a limited purpose, and was completely devoid of ... customer appeal. . . . one advertisement was like all others."
There were advances in American advertising in the larger cities during the 1820s and 1830s with improvements in printing technology and a change in advertising philosophy. James Gordon Bennett, Sr.'s, New York Herald and other New York penny press newspapers prided themselves on speaking directly to the mass public in understandable and accessible terms, and they wanted their advertising to have the same appeal. In 1848, Bennett began changing the Herald's advertisements every day, making them news just like the editorial matter.
The precursors of advertising agencies also date from this period. By the 1840s, Volney B. Palmer was listing his "coal and advertising" agency in New York City's business directory. The very description of the business - coal and advertising - illustrates how undifferentiated advertising was in those days.
Modern advertising really began in the 1880s, when new methods of manufacturing led to greatly increased output and decreased costs for the producers of consumer goods. Advances in packaging technology meant that products could be packaged at the plant rather than shipped to a wholesaler who traditionally broke bulk and put his own name on them. Moreover, the telegraph network was in place and the continent had been crisscrossed by a network of railroads, bringing its farthest reaches within the purview of the incipient consumer culture.
Prior to the 1880s, the American marketing system had been characterized by an intricate set of wholesalers, jobbers, and other middlemen whose most important function was to buy in large lots and sell in smaller ones. In this age, the wholesaler was king. But in the new era of the 1880s, the importance of the packaged goods manufacturer greatly increased. What manufacturers could package at their own plant, they could brand. What they could brand, they could advertise. What they could distribute nationally, they could advertise nationally. This, Daniel A. Pope has written, "necessitated the growth of advertising agencies and dictated their activities" and also "tipped the balance in advertising from information (however specious much of it had been) to persuasion."
National advertisers provided the media and advertising agencies with a new set of clients whose standards of conduct were far higher than those preceding them. The most widely advertised consumer products through most of the nineteenth century had been patent medicines - nostrums for which their purveyors made extravagantly false claims. But the new companies, although not always innocent of misstatements, depended upon repeat-purchase behavior and thus upon building a bond of trust with the consumer. To do this, they had to eschew blatant falsehoods.
As late as 1893, according to Pope, more than half of a sample of over a hundred firms spending more than fifty thousand dollars annually on advertising were patent medicine manufacturers, whose advertisements were often of the "cancer cure" variety. His list of the largest national advertisers some twenty years later showed a sharp contrast. Most of these firms were not "medical messiahs" but manufacturers of food, consumer chemicals like soap and cosmetics, and consumer durables like automobiles and auto accessories.
For these new firms, advertising served many purposes:
The management of the distribution system. Manufacturer advertising could pressure distributors into stocking products because advertising created consumer demand. A consumer might feel more loyalty to a heavily advertised brand like Coca-Cola than to a particular soda fountain and thus not patronize a fountain that did not carry Coca-Cola.
For the consumer product marketer, advertising became the marketing analogy to assembly-line production techniques. It was systematized mass salesmanship, which became a key weapon in the arsenal of companies seeking to create and build brands.
With the new mix of advertising clients and the new conception of advertising came a host of changes in the trade that sharply differentiated twentieth-century practice from the previous era. Among the most important changes were those in the areas of copywriting, research, and source of compensation.
Through most of the nineteenth century, the principal function of the nation's advertising agencies was to buy space in publications at wholesale and sell it to advertisers at retail. In 1892, the N. W. Ayer and Son agency in Philadelphia hired its first full-time copywriter to write the advertisement itself. Soon after, Albert Davis Lasker of the Chicago agency of Lord and Thomas greatly boosted the prestige of the copywriting function within the agency. He founded the "reason why" school, which held that an advertisement had to give the customer a specific reason (perhaps a more accurate description would be "rational-sounding excuse") to purchase a product. This approach contrasted with the bulk of previous copy, which had often consisted of an announcement accompanied by disconnected and incredible claims to excellence.
Modern business corporations and advertising agencies make a major effort to research the projected and actual impact of their advertising. Research at agencies dates back at least to 1879, when Ayer undertook its first such project. Since then agencies, their clients, and independent market research firms - often assisted by marketing academicians and economists - have spent large sums to determine advertising's effectiveness.
Advertising agencies have always been intermediaries between advertisers and the mass media. During much of the nineteenth century, it was unclear whom the agency represented. Was it primarily a seller of media space or a seller of a manufacturer's product? In the twentieth century, the answer has been the latter. Agencies sell products by buying space or time and are compensated by manufacturers.
The most visible change in advertising in the past hundred years has resulted from the new technology of broadcasting. Initially, many thought that advertising over the "ether" would never be accepted by the public because it would constitute an obnoxious intrusion into the home of the owner of a radio set. And even if it did not prove unacceptable on grounds of taste, many felt that radio advertising should be prohibited as a matter of public policy. When he was secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover said at a conference on radio in 1922 that it was "inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service to be drowned in advertising chatter." By the end of the decade, however, advertisers and their agents had come to realize radio's possibilities. With its drama and immediacy, radio could convey their message directly to the consumer who would not need to purchase a publication or even be literate.
In the 1950s came television, which was commercialized in the United States to an exceptional degree. American advertisers had more minutes to telecast more commercial messages to more market segments (including children) than anywhere else in the world. Through television, advertisers could demonstrate the use of their product and present well-known figures to praise it. As had been the case with radio, those companies that first exploited the commercial potential of television reaped lavish rewards.
Advertising has been heavily criticized on a variety of counts. Economists have charged that advertising distorts competition by raising barriers to the entry of new firms into an industry and by distracting the consumer from price. Sociologists have complained that advertising barges into the home with pseudopopulist rhetoric ("We do it all for you") that in fact encourages a starkly materialistic approach to the world and promotes an ethos suggesting that what one possesses is more important than who one is. The historian of the content of advertising copy Roland Marchand has shown how advertisements adopt various clichés and parables whose relationship to a sensible evaluation of a product's benefits is tenuous at best. Indeed, much advertising copy conveys a message that, if not false, is not really true either.
Consumer advocates have accused advertising of victimizing children too young to tell the difference between a sales pitch and disinterested advice, and they have assailed what they view as its offensiveness to the elderly, to minorities, and to women. Educators, journalists, and others have often voiced disapproval of advertising: a "torrent of mendacity, imbecility, and bilge" was how author Bernard De Voto characterized it some years ago.
Among advertising's critics are the corporations that pay for it. Witness the following complaint: "I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted. The problem is that I don't know which half." This quip, attributed to John Wanamaker, Frank W. Woolworth, and Lord Leverhulme among others, has gained a permanent place in advertising lore and illustrates the degree to which advertisers themselves, despite the vast sums spent on research, remain skeptical about how effective their advertising dollars really are.
It is, however, worth noting that disingenuous as it often has been, advertising is first of all about persuasion. It has, therefore, been historically far less important in command economies than it has been in market economies. For all its many faults, relative freedom to advertise is an emblem of a more general economic and social freedom. Perhaps it is part of the price we pay for that freedom.
The history channel,
Paul W. Farris and John A. Quelch, Advertising and Promotion Management: A Manager's Guide to Theory and Practice (1983); Daniel A. Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (1983); Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (1990). Richard S. Tedlow
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