The oldest known printed ad sold needles in Song dynasty China
A copper printing plate from Song dynasty China turned out square posters for Liu's needle shop in Jinan, complete with a rabbit logo and a promise of fine steel needles ready for home use. It is regarded as the earliest printed advertisement yet identified, a distant ancestor of an industry now worth over a trillion dollars a year.
Selling by message is ancient. Egyptians wrote sales pitches on papyrus, Pompeii's ruins preserve commercial notices and campaign slogans, and Greeks and Romans posted lost-and-found notices. China's Classic of Poetry describes bamboo flutes played to sell sweets. In medieval European towns, where most people could not read, shops hung pictures instead of words: a boot for a cobbler, a horseshoe for a smith, a bag of flour for a miller. Street criers announced the carts, and a 13th-century poem gathered the cries of Paris.
Newspapers turned ads into a business model. By the late 18th century they filled a large share of English papers, mostly promoting books and medicines, usually without pictures. In the United States, where by 1822 more people read newspapers than anywhere else, about half the content was advertising. In 1836 the French paper La Presse became the first to carry paid ads, letting it cut its price and widen its readership, and rivals soon copied it. Beechams coined what is often called the first slogan in 1859, calling its pills worth a guinea a box.
Agencies followed. Around 1840 Volney Palmer in Philadelphia bought newspaper space in bulk and resold it, and in 1869 N. W. Ayer and Son, also in Philadelphia, offered complete campaigns. Thomas J. Barratt, working for Pears soap, is often called the father of modern advertising. He pushed a strong brand image, blanket campaigns and constant attention to changing tastes, and in 1882 hired the actress Lillie Langtry, the first celebrity endorsement of a product.
Global spending topped an estimated 1 trillion US dollars in 2025. The year before, digital channels took 59.4 percent and television 24.9 percent, with cinema a mere 0.4 percent. Omnicom, Publicis and WPP led the agency groups.
Source: Advertising
