Origin of Advertisement

Advertisement! What is it? We are continually bombarded with it –choked with stuff, confusing our sense of balance and peace. To advertise is to publicize and draw attention. The peacock loves it. He advertises his wings in the hope of catching the best mate. The cuckoo does the same with its voice to woo its partner. Nature runs the best advertising agency. We are all at it from dawn to dusk.

Advertisements are also not without history!

 

It chronicles the movement from face-to-face selling messages to the stilted, repetitive, printed advertisements of early newspapers to the dynamism of mass communication by radio and television to the re-personalization of messages via cable, Internet, and direct mail.

 

Chronology of advertisement developments

 

Advertising began to take on its true colors with the coming of the Printing Age in the 15th and 16th centuries mainly in the form of handbills.

 

In the 17th century, it made its presence felt in the newspapers. The first newspaper advertisement was published in the Boston News-Letter. It was an announcement seeking a buyer for an Oyster Bay, Long Island, estate.

In 1729, Benjamin Franklin began publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette in Philadelphia, which included pages of "new advertisements."

In 1843, the first full-fledged advertising agency started operating in Philadelphia, by Volney Palmer.

From the 19th century advertising began to march hand in hand with economic growth. This is when mail-order advertising made its appearance. From 1920 radio stations began functioning and soon became advertising mediums. Television joined in from the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.

 

A new trend was seen from the 1960’s.

Advertising became an art. It became creative and called out to the best talents.

 

India & Advertisement

 

Indian Advertising started with the hawkers calling out their wares right from the days when cities and markets first began.

Concrete advertising history began with classified advertising.

The first print ad appeared in Hickey's Bengal Gazette, India’s first weekly newspaper, in the year, 1780. Englishman James Augustus Hickey, the pioneer of Indian newspaper realized that publishing newspaper was very costly process. He was loosing money faster than the speed at which newspapers came out of the printing press. To make ends meet, Hickey decided to take on advertisements or ads. Advertisers during those times were mostly from 'patent' medicine manufacturers. (The concept of chemist or druggist shops was not known then. Most medicines were grandma’s recipes and were thus sold (patented) under their own names.)

It took nearly 120 years for someone to discover that expertise was required in framing catchy copy to attract customers and a right magazine or journal to address the right audience. 

 To fill up this vacuum, the first Indian ad agency, B Dattaram & Co from Girgaum, Mumbai, was set up.  It didn't take long for others to notice that Dattaram's cash registers were ringing. By the 1920s, other agencies like Gujarat Advertising and Allied Advertising came up. 

The first foreign ad agency, in India was Alliance Advertising, set up during World War I. Later on, in 1929, J Walter Thomson (JWT) set up. It was hired to look after General Motors' Indian interests in the country. 

With the arrival of various multinational ad agencies, smaller agencies began to disappear or got merged with larger ones.

 

The social history preserved in advertisements is like an archaeological record. It is not a simple, faithful chronology of society but an assortment of bits and pieces on which the passage of social life is inscribed. By their very nature, advertisements are fleeting and ephemeral. Once they serve their intended purpose, they are typically discarded and quickly replaced. But some ads survive, preserved in old newspapers and magazines, on wire and tape recordings, and in kinescopes and videotapes. These preserved advertisements can be studied in the present for what they reveal about our collective past. From them, we learn not only about the techniques of past advertising but also about the society that produced them and the lives of the people who wrote, read, and heard their messages.