By CJ Pomerantz
What’s the greatest ad of all time? Some people will say the Coke classic “Teach the World to Sing”. Others love Apple’s “1984”. We’re partial to the original Budweiser “Wazzup”. No matter what your favorite is, the fact remains that we’re surrounded and inundated by ads during every waking minute of the day. Ads serve a variety of purposes, from educating audiences about potential dangers in our everyday lives, to persuading them to take a political action, and from informing them about a new product, or convincing them to keep buying an old product.
According to Siteefy, in 2005 the average number of ads seen in a day across all possible platforms, including digital, TV, Out of the Home (OOTH), and print was around 5,000. In 2024 that number has doubled, and the average person sees more than 10,000 ads a day. We see more ads in a single day, than our medieval ancestors would see in an entire lifetime.
Given how deeply advertising has permeated almost every aspect of our daily lives, we felt like it would be helpful (and interesting!) to learn about the history of advertising, starting back in the beginning, and working forward. In addition to its ancient roots, we’ll discuss how advertising has changed and how in the past century, advertising has moved into a more narrative space.
Early Advertising: PreHistory, Egypt, Rome, and Medieval Times
Advertising has been around as long as human beings have been around. Even before we had written language, we were creating communication to educate other people. Cave paintings were an early way for nomadic people to communicate to those who followed that there was a saber-toothed tiger in that cave, or that these berries killed people.
However, the first time that we see what we would consider a true precursor to a modern ad is in ancient Egypt, where a slave owner exhorted the good people of Thebes to return his slave. From there we move onto the Romans, who used wall paintings, decorative facades, and other outdoor features to drive more customers to their businesses. We also see the first recorded use of paid media, with shop owners and artisans paying criers to call more attention to their goods.
These practices continued as the only forms of advertising for the next millennia or so, until we arrive at medieval times, and another leap forward in advertising and marketing strategy. It’s during this timeframe that we begin to see the formation of guilds, groups of merchants and artisans within the same discipline working together to improve their products, their capacity to create goods, and their ability to sell and distribute those goods. Each guild had its own symbol or mark that would be included on all the products its members made, in the first example of branding. If a person saw the ironworkers guild mark on a piece of equipment, they could trust that the work was done by someone with skill and experience, and thus would be willing to pay more for it.
These early civilizations paved the way for what was to come, and as we moved to the future, the changes would come faster and faster.
The Printing Press Revolution
In 1440 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, kicking off the very first tech boom, and laying the very first foundation for the information age we live in today. Suddenly the written word didn’t have to be painstakingly copied by hand, any mistakes becoming the official version, and days dedicated to creating a single pages. In the time it took to create one copy of a book, a thousand could be printed and in the hands of readers. As it became easier for people to get the written word, more people learned to read, with literacy rates jumping from below 30% to more than 60% over a relatively short period of time.
As more people learned to read, the ability to advertise to those people also increased, as did the ease of disseminating the ads. In the time it took to create one hand painted ad in medieval times, all of London could be covered with posters informing customers of your wares. Pamphlets also became an early and important tool to help create sales, educating potential customers without the maker or shopkeeper required to be on hand.
The final and most important step of this era towards the establishment of advertising as we know it today, was the creation and adoption of newspapers, one or more of which were in every major city by the early 1700s. All of this set the stage for what would come next.
The Industrial Revolution & Beyond
At the same time another seachange was taking place. The Industrial Revolution took us from a world of individual hand crafted goods to the world of mass production. With all the additional capacity to manufacture, there became a need to create demand for the additional goods. And with newspapers well established as trustworthy places for information, the world of modern ads was born.
Companies began to make and ship goods across the country and around the world, which led to the evolution from guildmarks to full blown branding where companies worked to control every facet of their public facing image. The ready availability of local news sources also gave these companies a place to share all of this information about the exciting new wealth of goods available to people.
This led to the rise of proper advertising agencies, copywriters, designers and more. Albert Lasker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Lasker), generally considered the father of modern advertising ushered in an era where copy didn’t just inform, but worked to actively sell customer’s on the features and benefits of the item being sold. Along with Edward Bernays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays), the father of Public Relations, a move was made from boring, purely informational text to ads that worked on the psychology of the audience, helping them imagine how much time they’d save with the latest innovation from Acme products, or how much money they’d save by being able to buy it at Macy’s.
The 20th Century: A Golden Age
When people think about advertising they picture Don Draper, Mad Men, and sharp suits. And that’s fitting, because this really was the heyday of advertising as both a science and an art. Where the show missed the truth is in the depiction of Don as a lone genius, able to determine the success or failure of a business with nothing more than his wits and pen. In truth, no agency depended on a single genius to provide all their campaigns and ideas. Agencies devoted teams of people to studying what was happening in the world, where trends were pointing in music and fashion and business and politics. They then worked with the designers and copywriters to distill that into print, radio, and TV spots, so that over the course of time they could convince audiences to buy things.
As early as the 1930’s advertisers had begun to develop and live by the rule of seven. This states that a prospective customer needs to see your message at least 7 times before they will make a purchase decision. This is really when the concept of multi-touch advertising began to take shape, and full campaigns began to develop that reached out to audiences not just in the pages of their newspapers, but on the radio, and over the airwaves, and on billboards, and even in their mailbox. One interesting fact, is that even though the number of ads we see has grown exponentially since the rule of 7 was developed, it doesn’t seem like that number has gone up. We still need to see a message about 7 times before we are ready to consider it.
It was in this era that we got the aforementioned ads that stand the test of time. In addition some other classics worth remembering are “Mikey Likes It!”, “Where’s the Beef?”, and "Mac Tonight".
The Digital Revolution & The Future
The 1990’s saw yet another revolution in advertising with the birth of the internet. During the dot com boom fortunes were built and lost as everyone and everything went online. But the real, lasting money wasn’t in products, it was in eyeballs. Companies that delivered visitors to sites were the real winners. And the ultimate winner is now one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Here’s some key statistics that illustrate the meteoric rise of digital advertising:
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1996: Planet Oasis, the first Platform for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, launches, laying the groundwork for a new era in targeted online marketing.
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1998: Yahoo, powered largely by its PPC platform, briefly becomes the most valuable company in the world, highlighting the immense potential of digital advertising.
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October 2000: Google Adwords enters the scene, forever changing the landscape of PPC advertising. Google's focus on relevant results and user experience has propelled it to dominate the online advertising space.
The sheer volume of advertising we encounter today is staggering. The average American adult is bombarded with an estimated 400 ads daily, with a significant portion originating from Google. In fact, Google serves a mind-blowing 20 million ads per minute. These numbers translate to financial dominance – Google's market valuation recently reached an absolutely mind boggling $1.6 trillion, with advertising revenue exceeding $257 billion in 2022. Notably, at the time of publishing this, Google's other business ventures operate at a loss, highlighting the immense profitability of its advertising platform.
It’s not just Google and pay per click that make up the bulk of advertising today. There’s also streaming platforms. There’s also social media. Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok are some of the most frequently visited websites in the world, and they each have their own advertising platforms, allowing companies to reach their audiences for a fraction of the cost of a traditional media buy. That fraction ads up though. In 2023, social media advertising revenue topped $205 billion, and is expected to reach $255 billion by 2028.
In addition to the paid explicit ads, there’s also an organic aspect to social media with the rise of influencers. While celebrity spokespeople are nothing new, the depth of data available to the average micro-influencer and their sponsors is something that the agencies who developed campaigns like Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds, or Jordan and Nike could only dream of a few decades ago. And all of that data helps marketers and advertisers further refine their audiences and messages.
Epilogue
So this was a lot of information. We literally touched on the entirety of recorded history to get to where we are today. And guess what. If you’re reading this anytime after the day it was published, then you’ve got more history to cover. That’s the thing with history. It keeps happening all the time.
But the other thing about history is that knowing it provides us a road map to the future. The face and facade of advertising will keep changing. In digital advertising it will change faster than any one person could keep up with. But the structure, the bones, the things that give us the framework we build our campaigns on will always be there.
Keep your message consistent.
Remember the rule of seven.
Remember that you are serving the customer, not the other way around.
Keep those things in mind and at the core of all of your marketing, and you’ll be successful. And if you need any help bringing it to life, don’t hesitate to give us a holler.
August 27, 2024
