Advertising has its earliest origins in ancient Egypt and ancient China on papyrus. The printed word first came into existence in medieval Europe in circa.
We are going to talk about the history and evolution of advertising and some big shifts in online advertising and marketing. Advertising has a history going back millennia. In fact, the origins of advertising go back to ancient times or even earlier, right to the stone age!
From rock carvings and papyrus to the radio and T. Over millennia, advertising mediums went through drastic change but advertising has a history of adapting cleverly and is still adapting. From papyrus to walls and stone tablets, to billboards, newspapers, radio, television, then computers to mobile phones, advertising has had several communication mediums.
Along with these mediums, the thinking, approach and attitudes toward advertising have changed as well. Advertising today is smarter, sharper and consumer-driven, unlike the advertising approach four or five decades ago which was product-driven. Thomas Hutchings, Creative Director of Emotive Brand, a California-based advertising agency makes interesting observations on the modern world of advertising.
Today, advertising has a large number of competitors — both clients and agencies. The days of a handful of ad firms that had leverage due to their exclusivity are long gone. What is Advertising? A Definition of Advertising Advertising vs.
Not So Fast. Our success is measured by yours. The mids was indeed the age of the newspaper but it was also the age of the newspaper advertisement — the most effective and cost efficient method of advertising the world had known.
While Bennett and other newspapermen were developing the newspaper in large Eastern cities as a mass medium for advertising, direct selling messages remained common in smaller towns all over America. Store clerks continued to deal face-to-face with their customers, discussing the uses and benefits for the products they sold.
However, by the mids itinerant salesmen had also become a part of American commerce. By , there were an estimated , traveling men doing business in America. Others sold directly to consumers door-to-door or in impromptu displays set up on street corners and other public venues. From the midth until well into the 20th century, traveling salesmen filled a critical niche in American marketing. Vast numbers of such men made their livings this way in the 19th century. These commercial travelers as historians often term them were typically white men without families who traveled by public transport, stayed in rented rooms, and skipped town fast.
They became the stuff of jokes and mythology — perhaps because their work and personal lives contrasted so strongly with the lives of those who lived in small-town America. Salesmanship entered the English language only in the s according to the Oxford English Dictionary and it differs from advertising in its use of face-to-face rather than mass-mediated communications and selling techniques.
The promotional and selling methods of salesmen are the important elements in the history of advertising. Whether to a merchant, an assembled crowd, or just a single customer, a salesman displayed his merchandise and adjusted his pitch to the needs and interests of his audience. Whether largely alcohol or cocaine or a medicine that really worked, the product was offered through a specially tailored message unlike the generalized pitches in mass advertisements.
Some scholars see salesmanship as a stage in the evolution of the modern persuasive techniques used in advertising, although this is not usually emphasized as a part of the history of American advertising.
By the beginning of the 20th century, an incipient consumer movement protesting the outrageous and unsupported claims of both the traveling salesmen and mass media advertising was developing.
When Arthur Miller famously wrote about the failed Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman in , his play captured the pitfalls of sales work for those who do it and the demise of the social niche of the salesman in the face of the evolution of mass, impersonal advertising techniques.
He was without a doubt one of the greatest showmen the world has known, but in the end he seems to have left more lingering doubts and suspicions rather than respect for his promotional methods. He seems to have had few scruples for doing whatever it took to attract an audience and make money from it. Deception was his game. Barnum had enticed them inside. He had entertained them a bit. And then he needed them out of the way to make room for others. Barnum used advertising to lure crowds to his museum and traveling exhibits.
In his early career, he focused on freaks and oddities that the public would pay to see. One of the most famous of these was known as the Fiji Mermaid exhibited in — which his ads and posters claimed to be half human, half fish. In actuality, the so-called mermaid was a hoax, consisting of the head of a monkey attached to the body of a fish.
Although Barnum is spoken of today as an artist of deception, he was not alone in using such techniques to lure the public. The later s were an age of vastly exaggerated claims — medicine shows, exhibitions of the unusual and strange, and unregulated advertising. Little wonder that a generalized suspicion of advertising developed around such tactics.
The historian Jackson Lears argues in The New Republic that such deceptive tactics hardly originated in antebellum American society. As America recovered from the Civil War — , commerce and newspapers once again took their place in the fabric of society. In the s and s, the forerunners of modern advertising agents came on the scene.
First offering to physically take ads from the shops of busy tradesmen to the offices of newspaper publishers, ad men provided a service that business found desirable. Two of the earliest agencies were N. Ayer in Philadelphia and J. Walter Thompson in New York. These agencies collected circulation figures of newspapers and magazines and based their commissions on readership.
Ayer and J. It was a short step from media placement to another service that indeed marked the beginnings of modern advertising. The agents offered to write the copy that would be placed in newspapers. By the turn of the 20th century, several advertising agencies had set up business in cities across America, marking the beginnings of a shift away from direct sales techniques to mass-communicated advertising.
What are the similarities and differences between salesmanship and advertising? Although both are persuasive techniques encouraging consumer purchasing, one is interpersonal in nature whereas the other is mediated. The consequence of this difference is a shift from individually tailored messages, to those that must be relevant to a broad and diverse audience.
Both the unregulated sales tactics and advertising claims of the 19th century engendered watchful suspicion on the part of consumers, making many people wary of the actual truth in the communications.
Both salesmen and advertisers work as intermediaries between sellers and buyers — a role not much appreciated in American society where dislike of all sorts of intermediaries advertisers, lawyers, brokers, and agents is frequently a part of the culture.
Advertisements consisting of a central catchy phrase or slogan became the mode in the s. A series of twelve rhymes ghost written by the author Bret Hart appeared in newspaper advertisements and on streetcar posters. These ditties, together with the images of the vaguely Dutch town and its contented inhabitants, were repeated so often that Sapolio cleanser became one of the best known cleaning products on the market.
The use of slogans as the focus of poster and newspaper advertising represented a break with the earlier technique of using long, wordy copy to explain the product and why the consumer should purchase it. Fascination with slogans continues into contemporary advertising. Throughout most of the 19th century, customers took their own containers to stores where they bought generic sugar, rice, coffee, molasses, salt, and other products. The advent of packaged goods — a box of salt, a bag of rice, and a pound of coffee with a brand name on it — changed marketing forever.
What exactly is a brand? Marketers tell us that brands have material markers — names, logos, and unique packaging and designs. But beyond these essential physical attributes, over time a brand acquires a history, a reputation, and a meaning to consumers. As brands emerged in the late s in America, advertising played a significant role in imbuing commodities with specific meanings. Other soaps and cleaning products were also some of the earliest successful brands.
Today, advertising is largely the business of promoting brands. On some few occasions, advertisements introduce a new brand. Around the turn of the 20th century, public dissatisfaction with quackery and unregulated advertising increased. Letters to the editors of magazines and newspapers and occasional articles challenged the false promises directly and called for regulation and change in marketing practices.
A pitchman who battled against catarrh planted one of the company in his audiences to step up when an appeal was made to test the potency of the salve on sale.
The shill did as he was bade. Finally the pitchman handed the sufferer a spotless handkerchief. The noise could be heard hundreds of feet away. By the turn of the 20th century, the public had grown increasingly weary of such promotion techniques. Gullible America will spend this year some seventy-five millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud.
For fraud, exploited by the skilfulest of advertising bunco men, is the basis of the trade. Should the newspapers, the magazines, and the medical journals refuse their pages to this class of advertisements, the patent medicine business in five years would be as scandalously historic as the South Sea Bubble, and the nation would be the richer not only in lives and money, but in drunkards and drug-fiends saved. Early steps in an incipient consumer movement in America led to more profound changes.
The Federal Trade Commission with its regulatory powers was established by Congress in The advertising industry established its own self-regulatory board, the National Advertising Review Council, in FYI: Adbusters. Several popular books also called attention to advertising and marketing excesses.
The term consumer has a gender in the English language and it is feminine became the operating principle of advertising in the early 20th century.
Along with this went the knowledge that 80 percent or more of consumer purchases — except for big ticket items like appliances, automobiles, and homes — were made by women. Most key employees of advertising agencies until about were white, protestant men while women held jobs like receptionists and secretaries. Today, more than half the employees in American advertising agencies are women. In these early years of stricter gender roles, men were advertisers , and women were consumers.
Thus, when advertising spoke to consumers, it usually did so with the voice of male authority. Stuart Ewen, who explored the role of advertisers in the early 20th century in Captains of Consciousness 8 , tells how advertising offered women labor saving devices like washing machines and at the same time instructed them in their proper domestic roles as mothers and homemakers. It was not until the rebirth of feminism in the s that advertising began to let women speak for themselves, use women as authority figures, and employ women in decision-making and creative roles in the advertising industry.
Although Guglielmo Marconi received the Nobel Prize in for the invention of radio, it was World War I that accelerated the technological developments that led to its becoming a medium of mass communication. The initial policy of some countries — Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, for example — was for government to control and manage programming and content.
The United States, by contrast, rather immediately allowed radio to become a commercial medium with minimal governmental regulation. Few innovations transformed the nature of advertising as fundamentally as radio. Only television and the Internet would prove so revolutionary. Radio liberated advertising from its relationship to literacy by communicating through music, jingles, and the spoken word.
Advertising agencies were skeptical at first, but soon radio became their newest medium and advertisers explored its seemingly endless possibilities. Click to hear audio. Advertising agencies reinvented themselves, often writing both commercials and the programming for their clients. Early radio stars frequently delivered the commercial messages during their shows.
The technique has reemerged more recently in the form of product placement in television, movies, and sporting events. User-Generated Content is the future of advertising.
Learn more about how TINT can support your marketing efforts with beautiful, authentic content created by your users. Request a demo with our UGC experts. The wonderful World Wide Web. Such a small moment set the precedent for the next seventy years. Now: Different Motives Today, the shift in the advertising world has seen the rise of other motives when it comes to commercials.
The product is no longer the centerpiece. Ad disaster? No, far from it. Consumers likes helpful content and digs deeper to find out more about the brand therefore building trust and a connection.
Note that the consumer is actively digging to find out more themselves. What has so drastically changed the ad landscape? The rise of user-generated content In a bid to build trust and get consumers on side, brands are partnering up with the people they want to purchase from them. Essentially, consumers have become a part of advertising, rather than a passive onlooker.
The need for loyal followers over one-time buyers Which brings me onto the final biggest change.
0コメント