Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages and wall posters. Commercial messages and political campaign displays have been found in the ruins of Pompeii and ancient Arabia. Lost and found advertising on papyrus was common in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Wall or rock painting for commercial advertising is another manifestation of an ancient advertising form, which is present to this day in many parts of Asia, Africa, and South America.
The tradition of wall
painting can be traced back to Indian rock art paintings that date back to 4000
BC. History tells us that Out-of-home advertising and billboards are the oldest
forms of advertising. As the towns and cities of the Middle Ages began to grow,
and the general populace was unable to read, signs that today would say
cobbler, miller, tailor or blacksmith would use an image associated with their
trade such as a boot, a suit, a hat, a clock, a diamond, a horse shoe, a candle
or even a bag of flour.
Fruits and vegetables
were sold in the city square from the backs of carts and wagons and their
proprietors used street callers (town criers) to announce their whereabouts for
the convenience of the customers. As education became an apparent need and
reading, as well as printing, developed advertising expanded to include
handbills. In the 18th century advertisements started to appear in weekly
newspapers in England.
These early print
advertisements were used mainly to promote books and newspapers, which became
increasingly affordable with advances in the printing press; and medicines,
which were increasingly sought after as disease ravaged Europe. However, false
advertising and so-called “quack” advertisements became a problem, which
ushered in the regulation of advertising content.
19th
Century:
Thomas J. Barratt
from London has been called “the father of modern advertising”. Working for the
Pears Soap Company, Barratt created an effective advertising campaign for the
company products, which involved the use of targeted slogans, images and
phrases. One of his slogans, “Good morning Have you used Pears’ soap?” was
famous in its day and well into the 20th century. Under Barratt’s guidance,
Pears Soap became the world’s first legally registered brand and is therefore
the world’s oldest continuously existing brand.
An advertising tactic
that he used was to associate the Pears brand with high culture and quality.
Most famously, he
used the painting Bubbles by John Everett Millais as an advertisement by adding
a bar of Pears soap into the foreground. (Millais protested at this alteration
of his work, but in vain as Barrat had bought the copyright.) Barratt continued
this theme with a series of adverts of well-groomed middle-class children,
associating Pears with domestic comfort and aspirations of high society.
Barrat established
Pears Annual in 1891 as a spin-off magazine which promoted contemporary
illustration and colour printing and in 1897 added the Pears Cyclopedia a
one-volume encyclopedia. From the early 20th century Pears was famous for the
annual “Miss Pears” competition in which parents entered their children into
the high-profile hunt for a young brand ambassador to be used on packaging and
in consumer promotions.
He recruited
scientists and the celebrities of the day to publicly endorse the product.
Lillie Langtry, a British music hall singer and stage actress with a famous
ivory complexion, received income as the first woman to endorse a commercial
product, advertising Pears Soap. Barratt introduced many of the crucial ideas
that lie being successful advertising and these were widely circulated in his
day. He constantly stressed the importance of a strong and exclusive brand
image for Pears and of emphasizing the products availability through saturation
campaigns.
He also understood
the importance of constantly reevaluating the market for changing tastes and
mores, stating in 1907 that “tastes chaiige, 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. Not
that the idea of today is always better than the older idea, but it is
different – it hits the present taste.”
As the economy
expanded across the world during the 19th century, advertising grew alongside.
In the United States, the success of this advertising format eventually led to
the growth of mail-order advertising.
In June 1836, French
newspaper La Presse was the first to include paid advertising in its pages,
allowing it to lower its price, extend its readership and increase its
profitability and the formula was soon copied by all titles. Around 1840,
Volney B. Palmer established the roots of the modern day advertising agency in
Philadelphia. In 1842 Palmer bought large amounts of space in various
newspapers at a discounted rate then resold the space at higher rates to
advertisers.
The actual ad – the
copy, layout, and artwork – was still prepared by the company wishing to
advertise; in effect, Palmer was a space broker. The situation changed in the
late 19th century when the advertising agency of N.W. Ayer & Son was
founded. Ayer and Son offered to plan, create, and execute complete advertising
campaigns for its customers. By 1900 the advertising agency had become the
focal point of creative planning, and advertising was firmly established as a
profession.
Around the same time,
in France, Charles-Louis Havas extended the services of his news agency, Havas
to include advertisement brokerage, making it the first French group to
organize. At first, agencies were brokers for advertisement space in
newspapers. N. W. Ayer & Son was the first full-service agency to assume
responsibility for advertising content. N.W. Ayer opened in 1869, and was
located in Philadelphia.
20th
Century:
At the turn of the
19th to 20th century, there were few career choices for women in business;
however, advertising was one of the few. Since women were responsible for most
of the purchasing done in their household, advertisers and agencies recognized
the value of women’s insight during the creative process. In fact, the first
American advertising to use a sexual sell was created by a woman -for a soap
product.
Although tame by
today’s standards, the advertisement featured a couple with the message “The
skin you love to touch”. Modern advertising was created with the innovative
techniques used in tobacco advertising beginning in the 1920s, most
significantly with the campaigns of Edward Bernays, which is often considered
as the founder of modern, Madison Avenue advertising.
The tobacco
industries was one of the firsts to make use of mass production, with the
introduction of the Bonsack machine to roll cigarettes. The Bonsack machine
allowed the production of cigarettes for a mass markets, and the tobacco
industry needed to match such an increase in supply with the creation of a
demand from the masses through advertising.
On
the Radio from the 1920s:
In the early 1920s,
the first radio stations were established by radio equipment manufacturers and
retailers who offered programmes in order to sell more radios to consumers. As
time passed, many non-profit organizations followed suit in setting up their own
radio stations, and included: schools, clubs and civic groups.
When the practice of
sponsoring programmes was popularized, each individual radio programme was
usually sponsored by a single business in exchange for a brief mention of the
business’ name at the selling smaller blocks of advertising time to several
businesses. This eventually became the standard for the commercial television
industry in the United States. However, it was still a common practice to have
single sponsor shows, such as The United States Steel Hour.
In some instances the
sponsors exercised great control over the content of the show—up to and
including having one’s advertising agency actually writing the show. The single
sponsor model is much less prevalent now, a notable exception being the
Hallmark Hall of Fame.
Media
Diversification in the 1960s:
In the 1960s,
campaigns featuring heavy spending in different mass media channels became more
prominent. For example, the Morgan Gasoline Company spent hundreds of millions
of dollars on a brand awareness campaign built around the simple and
alliterative theme put a Tiger in Your Tank. Psychologist Ernest Dichter and
DDB Worldwide copywriter Sandy Sulcer learned that motorists desired both power
and play while driving, and chose the tiger as an easy-to-remember symbol to
communicate those feelings.
The North American
and later European campaign featured extensive television and radio and
magazine ads, including photos with tiger tails supposedly emerging from car
gas tanks, promotional events featuring real tigers, billboards, and in Europe
station pump hoses “wrapped in tiger stripes” as well as pop music songs. Tiger
imagery can still be seen on the pumps of successor firm ExxonMobil.
Cable
Television from the 1980s:
The late 1980s and early
1990s saw the introduction of cable television and particularly MTV. Pioneering
the concept of the music video, MTV ushered in a new type of advertising: the
consumer tunes in for the advertising message, rather than it being a
by-product or afterthought. As cable and satellite television became
increasingly prevalent, speciality channels emerged, including channels
entirely devoted to advertising, such as QVC, Home Shopping Network, and Shop
TV Canada.
On
the Internet from the 1990s:
With the advent of
the ad server, marketing through the Internet opened new frontiers for
advertisers and contributed to the “dot-com” boom of the 1990s. Entire
corporations operated solely on advertising revenue, offering everything from
coupons to free Internet access. At the turn of the 20th to 21st century, a
number of websites including the search engine Google, started a change in
online advertising by emphasizing contextually relevant, unobtrusive ads
intended to help, rather than inundate, users.
This has led to beginning
and end of the sponsored shows. However, radio station owners soon realized
they could earn more money by selling sponsorship rights in small time
allocations to multiple businesses throughout their radio station’s broadcasts,
rather than selling the sponsorship rights to single businesses per show.
Public
Service Advertising in WW2:
The advertising
techniques used to promote commercial goods and services can be used to inform,
educate and motivate the public about non-commercial issues, such as HIV/AIDS,
political ideology, energy conservation and deforestation. Advertising, in its
non-commercial guise, is a powerful educational tool capable of reaching and
motivating large audiences. “Advertising justifies its existence when used in
the public interest- it is much too powerful a tool to use solely for
commercial purposes.”
Attributed to Howard
Gossage by David Ogilvy. Public service advertising, non-commercial
advertising, public interest advertising, cause marketing, and social marketing
are different terms for (or aspects of) the use of sophisticated advertising
and marketing communications techniques (generally associated with commercial
enterprise) on behalf of non-commercial, public interest issues and
initiatives.
Commercial Television
in the 1950s:
This practice was
carried over to commercial television in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A
fierce battle was fought between those seeking to commercialise the radio and
people who argued that the radio spectrum should be considered a part of the
commons – to be used only non-commercially and for the public good. The United
Kingdom pursued a public funding model for the BBC, originally a private
company, the British Broadcasting Company, but incorporated as a public body by
Royal Charter in 1927. In Canada, advocates like Graham Spry were likewise able
to persuade the federal government to adopt a public funding model, creating
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. However, in the United States, the
capitalist model prevailed with the passage of the Communications
Act of 1934 which
created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). However, the U.S. Congress
did require commercial broadcasting companies to operate in the “public
interest, convenience, and necessity”. Public broadcasting now exists in the
United States due to the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act which led to the Public
Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).
In the early 1950s,
the DuMont Television Network began the modern practice of selling
advertisement time to multiple sponsors. Previously, DuMont had trouble finding
sponsors for many of their programmes and compensated by to a plethora of
similar efforts and an increasing trend of interactive advertising.
The share of
advertising spending relative to GDP has changed little across large changes in
media. For example, in the United States in 1925, the main advertising media
were newspapers, magazines, signs on streetcars, and outdoor posters.
Advertising spending as a share of GDP was about 2.9 percent. By 1998,
television and radio had become major advertising media. Nonetheless,
advertising spending as a share of GDP was slightly lower- about 2.4 percent.
A recent advertising
innovation is “guerrilla marketing”, which involves unusual approaches such as
staged encounters in public places, giveaways of products such as cars that are
covered with brand messages, and interactive advertising where the viewer can
respond to become part of the advertising message. Guerrilla advertising is
becoming increasingly more popular with a lot of companies.
No comments:
Post a Comment