Advertising is a way in which companies promote their products to boost sales
and make profits. It is also 'mass communication', and the advertiser pays for it
in order to convince a certain segment of the public to adopt ideas or take
actions of benefit to the advertiser. I am going to examine some of the ways in
which these purposes are achieved.
The origins of advertising lie thousands of years in the past. One of the first
known methods was an outdoor display, usually an eye-catching sign painted
on the wall of a building. Archaeologists have uncovered many such signs,
notably in the ruins of ancient Rome and Popeii. The one excavated in Rome
offers property for rent.
Early in medieval times a simple but effective form of advertising was when
popular merchants employed 'town criers' who shouted out praise about the
company/advertisers.
Printed advertising was not huge until 1445 when Johannes Gutenburg
invented the printing press.
An 1890s advertisement showing model Hilda Clark i...
"Get fat on Lorings Fat-ten-u and corpula foods"; ...
AdvertisingWith this merchants he made flyers with
characteristic symbols. This form lasted for a long time.
In terms of volume, advertising had made its greatest advance in the United
States of America. In the early days, the nation had a lack of transformed
transportation and communication systems. This is why nationwide promotion
was not possible. But then clever manufactures had the idea to reach their
customer directly through catalogues. The first mail-order houses appeared in
the early 1870s.
In 1880 a new era of advertising began; new ways of manufacturing led to
greatly increased output and decreased the costs for the producers of consumer
goods. The most widely advertised consumer products at this time were patent
medicines, ''By 1893 more than half of over a hundred firms spending more
than fifty thousand dollars annually on advertising were patent medicine
manufacturers''.
But only...