The History and Development of Advertising
Frank Presbrey traces advertising from stamped Babylonian bricks and the Rosetta Stone to 1928 radio, in 65 chapters with more than 350 reproduced ads. The English part covers the siquis notices, signboards, John Houghton's 1692 trade paper, the tax on advertisements, Warren's Blacking with its Cruikshank cat, and Harmsworth.
What it is
Frank Presbrey traces advertising from stamped Babylonian bricks and the Rosetta Stone to 1928 radio, in 65 chapters with more than 350 reproduced ads. The English part covers the siquis notices, signboards, John Houghton's 1692 trade paper, the tax on advertisements, Warren's Blacking with its Cruikshank cat, and Harmsworth. The larger American part runs from Franklin and the penny papers through Barnum, the first agents Volney Palmer and John Hooper, George Rowell, the patent-medicine wave and John E. Powers's plain honest copy, to Wanamaker, the half-tone, the slogans and jingles of the 1890s, magazines, outdoor and the modern agency. Later chapters cover the 1904 Ladies' Home Journal exposure of nostrums, the automobile, war bonds and radio. It ends with publishers' advertising receipts from 1867 and chapters on advertising's economic and social place, quoting Coolidge that mass demand comes from advertising.
Why read it now
Read it as a source book, not a neutral history. Its value is the record: dated ads, named people, rates and receipts that are hard to find elsewhere. Several patterns it documents still hold. Warren's cat sold because it had little pictorial competition in the papers, the same point attention research makes about standing apart from the category. The 1890s move from bare orders such as Use Sapolio to slogans and to trade characters like the Quaker man and the Sozodont Girl shows brands building what researchers now call distinctive assets. The patent-medicine and clean-up chapters show false claims damaging trust in all advertising until publishers and law stepped in, a lesson behind today's rules on health claims. What has not held is the thesis that a nation is as prosperous as its advertising, or Coolidge's claim that advertising created mass demand almost entirely; economists treat it as one driver among many. Presbrey ran an agency and writes to raise his trade's standing, and some passages carry the racial language of 1929. Use: when a client calls an idea new, look for its precedent here first.
Passages worth keeping
A nation is just as enterprising and prosperous as is its advertising.
هذه أطروحة الكتاب: الإعلان مقياس لنشاط الأمة التجاري، وهي دعوى أوسع مما تثبته الأدلة.
Whether advertisements of schools or houses and lodgings about London may be useful, I submit to those concerned.
هوتون يعرض الإعلان على فئة جديدة من المعلنين بسؤال مهذب، فيبني سوق الإعلان في نشرته فئة بعد فئة.
Nevertheless this advertising, because it was a novelty, made Warren’s Shoe Blacking known throughout the Kingdom and produced a heavy sale of it.
نجح الإعلان لأنه كان جديدًا في صحف تكاد تخلو من الصور، فالتميز عن المحيط هو سبب الانتشار لا جودة النص.
It is but slight exaggeration, if any, to say that modern advertising got its first real energy in 1891 from two slogans: “You press the button; we do the rest” and “See that hump?”
يرى المؤلف أن الإعلان الحديث انطلق مع الشعار القصير الذي يدخل لغة الناس اليومية، مثل شعار كوداك: اضغط الزر ونحن نتولى الباقي.
The first big reform gun was fired in 1892, when the Ladies’ Home Journal announced that it would print no more medical advertising.
بدأ إصلاح الإعلان من الناشرين حين رفضوا إعلانات الأدوية، لأن الادعاءات الكاذبة كانت تضر بثقة الناس في كل الإعلانات.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
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