Advertising

• 1. Introduction

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  Advertising is one of the oldest forms of human communication, stretching back to papyrus sales messages in ancient Egypt and wall paintings that survive to this day in parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. But how did a practice rooted in hand-painted rock faces and town criers become an industry whose worldwide spending topped estimates exceeding a trillion dollars in 2025? And why, after a century of radio, television, and the internet reshaping how messages travel, does advertising still claim roughly the same slice of economic output it held in 1925?

  These are not trivial questions. By 2024, digital channels alone captured 59.4 percent of all global ad spending, with television holding 24.9 percent and every other medium splitting the remaining fraction. In 2025, three companies, Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP, stood as the world's largest advertising agency groups, orchestrating campaigns across every inhabited continent. Meanwhile, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together controlled more than half of all advertising spend globally, excluding China.

  To understand how we arrived here, it helps to start somewhere far more humble: a rabbit.

• 2. Ancient Roots

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  A copper printing plate from the Song dynasty era is considered the world's earliest identified printed advertising medium. It produced a square sheet of paper bearing a rabbit logo alongside the copy for "Jinan Liu's Fine Needle Shop," promising customers high-quality needles ready for use at home. That plate predates moveable type in Europe and shows that the commercial impulse to brand a product and attach it to a visual identity is ancient.

  In China, the Classic of Poetry, compiled between the 11th and 7th centuries BC, records bamboo flutes being played to sell confectionery. Advertising in that era typically took the form of calligraphic signboards and inked papers. Meanwhile, the tradition of wall painting for commercial purposes traces back to Indian rock art dated to 4000 BC.

  In the ruins of Pompeii and ancient Arabia, archaeologists have uncovered commercial messages and political campaign displays. Lost-and-found notices on papyrus were common in ancient Greece and Rome. In medieval European towns, where most people could not read, tradespeople replaced written signs with images: a boot for a cobbler, a hat for a hatter, a candle for a chandler. Merchants selling fruits and vegetables in city squares employed street callers, known as town criers, to announce their locations.

  The first known compilation of those street cries was gathered in "Les Crieries de Paris," a thirteenth-century poem by Guillaume de la Villeneuve.

• 3. The Newspaper Era

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  By the end of the 18th century in England, newspaper circulations had grown enough that advertising became a significant proportion of their content. The shift was so pronounced that the word "advertiser" began appearing in newspaper names and titles themselves.

  In August 1859, British pharmaceutical firm Beechams created what is considered the world's first advertising slogan for Beecham's Pills: "Worth a guinea a box." The phrase was said to have been uttered by a satisfied purchaser from St Helens, Lancashire, the founder's hometown. The Beechams adverts ran in newspapers around the world and helped transform the company into a global brand.

  In France, the newspaper La Presse moved first, in June 1836, to include paid advertising in its pages. That decision let the paper lower its cover price, extend its readership, and increase profitability. Every other French title soon copied the formula.

  Around 1840 in Philadelphia, Volney B. Palmer established the foundations of the modern advertising agency. In 1842 he bought large volumes of space in newspapers at discounted rates, then resold that space at higher prices to advertisers. Palmer was a space broker, not a creative service. That changed in 1869 when the first full-service agency, N.W. Ayer and Son, also founded in Philadelphia, offered to plan, create, and implement complete campaigns. By 1900, the advertising agency had become the focal point of creative planning, and advertising had established itself as a recognized profession.

  Across the Atlantic in France, Charles-Louis Havas extended his news agency's services to include advertisement brokerage around the same period, showing that the shift from information to persuasion was happening on both sides of the ocean.

• 4. The Father of Modern Advertising

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  Thomas J. Barratt, born in 1841, spent his career working for the Pears soap company in London and has been called "the father of modern advertising" by the writer T.F.G. Coates. Barratt became the company's brand manager in 1865, a position listed as the first of its kind by the Guinness Book of Records.

  His method was systematic. He stressed the importance of a strong and exclusive brand image, insisted on saturation campaigns to emphasize the product's availability, and understood that markets were not static. In 1907 he stated: "Tastes change, fashions change, and the advertiser has to change with them. An idea that was effective a generation ago would fall flat, stale, and unprofitable if presented to the public today."

  One of his slogans, "Good morning. Have you used Pears' soap?" became famous well into the 20th century. In 1882, he recruited English actress and socialite Lillie Langtry to become the poster girl for Pears, making her the first celebrity to endorse a commercial product.

  Barratt was not alone in shaping the field. Albert Lasker, born in 1880, defined advertising as "salesmanship in print, driven by a reason why" and is also sometimes called the father of modern advertising. Claude C. Hopkins, born in 1866, popularized test campaigns and coupon-based direct mail to measure marketing spend. David Ogilvy, born in 1911, pioneered the positioning concept and championed the use of brand image. And Rosser Reeves, born in 1910, developed the unique selling proposition and advocated for repetition as a core technique.

  Huntley and Palmers biscuits, one of the world's first global brands, were sold in 172 countries in 1900 and their advertisements reflected that reach.

• 5. Psychology Enters the Picture

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  In 1919, advertising expenditure in the United States reached 2.5 percent of gross domestic product. Industrialization had created both mass production and a new problem: how to persuade enough consumers to buy what factories were making.

  The answer, in the 1910s and 1920s, came partly from psychology. Psychologists Walter D. Scott and John B. Watson applied behavioral theory to advertising. Scott argued that people were more suggestible than rational, and he demonstrated this by using direct commands in advertising copy.

  Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, went further. He articulated a principle that selling to rational minds was less effective than appealing to unconscious desires, writing that the successful communicator must understand the true motives behind human action, not the surface reasons people give for their choices. Bernays was hired by tobacco companies specifically to create positive associations with cigarette smoking, a task that helped pioneer new advertising techniques.

  By the 1920s, under Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, the American government actively promoted advertising. In 1925, Hoover delivered an address to the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World titled "Advertising Is a Vital Force in Our National Life." Julius Klein, head of the U.S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, declared in October 1929 that advertising was "the key to world prosperity."

  By the 1940s, manufacturers began recognizing how consumers formed psychological and anthropological relationships with their brands. Campaigns for Chrysler and Exxon and Esso, drawing on research from psychology and cultural anthropology, produced some of the most enduring advertising of the 20th century.

• 6. Broadcast and the Screen Age

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  In the early 1920s, the first radio stations were set up by equipment manufacturers, then by schools, clubs, and civic groups. Within a decade, slogans, mascots, and jingles had become staples of radio advertising, and the format spread to early television in the 1930s.

  Radio produced one unexpected cultural artifact. The earliest drama series were sponsored by soap manufacturers, and the genre acquired a name that has stuck ever since: the soap opera.

  In the early 1950s, the DuMont Television Network began selling advertising time to multiple sponsors rather than relying on a single patron for each show. Previously, DuMont had struggled to find sponsors and compensated by selling smaller blocks of airtime to several businesses. This eventually became the standard model for commercial television in the United States, though single-sponsor programs such as The United States Steel Hour continued, and the format persists today in vehicles like the Hallmark Hall of Fame.

  The late 1980s and early 1990s brought cable television and, specifically, MTV. MTV pioneered the music video as a format and introduced a new relationship between audience and advertising: viewers tuned in for the advertising message itself rather than treating it as an interruption. Specialty channels followed, including QVC, Home Shopping Network, and ShopTV Canada, which were built entirely around the act of selling.

  At the 2025 Super Bowl, a thirty-second advertising slot cost US$8 million, and the game attracted an audience of over 123 million, continuing a trend that began decades earlier.

• 7. Digital and the Algorithmic Turn

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  Spam has been a problem for email users since 1978. The first banner ad appeared on the World Wide Web in 1994. Both facts point to the same pattern: wherever new channels open, advertising follows almost immediately.

  Google was founded in 1998 and by the early 2000s had become the most widely used search engine. In 2000, Google launched AdWords, an auction system that allowed advertisers to bid for placement in paid search results and rewarded high-quality ads with better positions and lower costs per click.

  Mobile phones became a mass advertising medium in 1998, when the first paid downloadable content appeared on mobile phones in Finland, with mobile advertising itself first launching in Finland in 2000. In 2007, the mobile advertising market was expected to be worth $3 billion. By 2025, that figure had grown to an estimated $262 billion.

  Social media followed a similar arc. In 2024, global social media advertising spend was expected to reach $247 billion, a 14.3 percent year-on-year increase. By 2025, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon controlled more than 50 percent of all advertising spend worldwide, excluding China.

  Despite all these shifts, one number has barely moved. In 1925, advertising spending as a share of U.S. GDP stood at about 2.9 percent. By 1998 it was still comparable. By 2017, with online spending having overtaken broadcast, it had slipped only to about 2.4 percent. The medium changes; the economic weight holds.

  Connected TV advertising spend was estimated to be growing by almost 20 percent each year as of 2024, driven partly by a shift in younger viewers: in the UK, less than half of 16-24 year olds were watching traditional television in an average week during 2023-2024.

• 8. Criticism and Regulation

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  A 2021 study of television advertising found that only a third of advertisers achieved a positive return on investment. That finding arrived alongside decades of criticism aimed at what advertising does to public life.

  Critics have pointed to the targeting of children with foods high in sugar, fat, and salt as a particularly contentious practice. Michelle Obama specifically criticized food companies for advertising unhealthy foods to children. In some parts of Europe, advertising to children has been banned outright. The concern rests partly on the argument that children may not recognize that they are being sold something.

  In the UK, displaying certain advertisements without consent is a criminal offence carrying a fine of up to 2,500 pounds. The city of Sao Paulo introduced an outright ban on billboard advertising. In the United States, attempts to ban billboard advertising in the 1960s led to the Highway Beautification Act.

  Self-regulation has become a parallel track. In the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority operates independently, funded by the industry, with the stated aim of ensuring advertising is legal, decent, honest, and truthful. France's 1994 Toubon Law restricts the use of English in advertising, though advertisers have responded by printing English words in bold with French translations in smaller type.

  Bernays's insight that advertising speaks to unconscious desire rather than rational deliberation has never been abandoned. The controversy he helped ignite, over the manipulation of desire and the ethics of persuasion, runs through every subsequent debate about what advertising is permitted to do, from tobacco campaigns in the mid-20th century to algorithmic targeting of individual users today.