Marketer in 960: A Song-dynasty trademark ad

The professional who creates demand — from Pompeii's painted walls and P&G's 1931 brand-man memo to the auction-driven feeds of the digital era. Selling is ancient; "marketing" as a named discipline is barely a century old. The walls of Pompeii carried painted commercial notices before Vesuvius sealed them in 79 CE, and a needle shop in Song-dynasty Jinan printed wrapping paper with a white-rabbit trademark a thousand years ago. But the job in its modern sense — one person accountable for a brand's demand — dates precisely to a three-page memo Neil McElroy wrote at Procter & Gamble in 1931.

Unlike surgery or law, marketing has no license, no bar exam and no protected title. Anyone can call themselves a marketer, which is exactly why the profession runs on demonstrated results instead of credentials: campaigns with numbers attached, brands that measurably grew. The work now splits into broad families — brand building, performance marketing, content, product marketing, research — that share one job description: understand why people buy, then make more of them do it.

This page follows the trade from town criers and patent-medicine showmen through Madison Avenue's creative revolution, the 4 Ps and the first banner ad, to today's auction-driven, AI-assisted feeds. It covers how people actually get in, what the day-to-day work involves, the eight practitioners who shaped the craft, what a marketer earns from São Paulo to Singapore, and — bluntly — how much of the job machines are already doing.