Brief History Of Advertising: From Print To Digital

Advertising has come a long way since the “early days”. We can probably go quite far back to discuss the earliest advertising methods, i.e. BC. However, let’s start truly with the first ad in the modern era. From traditional print ads to digital advertising. The world of advertising never seems to amaze us. 

Boston was the site of the first printed newspapers in colonial North America. The first print ad was published in The Boston News Letter in 1704.  It was an ad for selling real estate on Oyster Bay, Long Island. You can read the full ad from 1704 here. Real estate was the first advertising vertical in North America. Congrats! We wrote blog about digital advertising for realtors. Check it out. 

In the 1800s, print ads started to become more sophisticated. They were not merely limited to text. Visuals were incorporated to make the ads more effective. Below is an Ivory Soap ad from Proctor & Gamble from 1882. As it is said, “a picture tells a thousand words. 

In 1841 Volney Palmer launched the first advertising agency in Philadelphia. Advertising agencies have come long way since then but it is an interesting fact that advertising agencies in North America have Philadelphia as ground zero. 

Another advertising medium that started to gain a foothold in the 1800s was outdoor advertising. In the advertising community, it’s commonly referred to OOH (Out-Of-Home). We are also specifically talking about billboards and not sign-boards, which go back to pre-modern history.   

With the advent of TV in the 1900s, advertising found a mass reach medium. The first TV commercial ever aired in 1941 for Bulova watches and it cost $9! You can watch the first TV ad here. In the early 1950s, viewers could see the world on the TV screen in color and TV ad spend just took off. It reached $1 billion in 1955. The television series “Mad Men” is set in the ’60s, the golden age of advertising. 

October 27, 1994, marked the digital era of advertising. The first banner ad honor goes to AT&T. Banner ads are not the talk of the town anymore but people clicked like crazy on this AT&T ad. It looked like this:

The CTR (click-through-rate) of the banner reached 44%. That is unheard of today and you can be glad to reach CTR of over 1%. Digital ads started to get more targeted in the mid-’90s, which gave rise to tracking tools like Doubleclick. 

The transition of the 20th into the 21st century saw the rise of paid search advertising. No, Google was not first in the game. It was actually, GoTo.com. Yahoo! acquired them later. However, Google came to the rescue and made the paid search game more leveled for smaller players. In the early days, the most cash got you the highest ranking and relevancy had no say.   

Digital marketing is developing rapidly and becoming more hyper-targeted. As we move further into the 21st-century new digital advertising opportunities are waiting for the early adopters. Digital advertising is moving into a new frontier. If you’d like to learn more about what we can do for your digital advertising needs then contact us here. For now, stay safe out there and let us all look to the future with new vigor.