c. 79 CEPompeii's painted advertisements
The eruption of Vesuvius preserved thousands of painted and scratched notices on Pompeii's walls — endorsements of election candidates, announcements of gladiatorial games, tavern promotions and property listings — the richest surviving snapshot of everyday commercial persuasion in the ancient world.
c. 960–1279A Song-dynasty trademark ad
The Liu family needle shop of Jinan, in Song-dynasty China, used an engraved bronze plate to print wrapping paper carrying a white-rabbit trademark and copy promising fine needles made from quality steel. The plate, now in the National Museum of China, is widely described as the world's earliest surviving printed brand advertisement.
1477Caxton prints England's first ad
William Caxton, England's first printer, produced a small handbill advertising the Sarum Ordinal, a priest's handbook, for sale at his Westminster shop — ending with the Latin plea "Supplico stet cedula": please leave this notice up. Printed advertising and the fight against ad removal were born in the same document.
1841The first advertising agency
Volney B. Palmer opened the first American advertising agency in Philadelphia, buying newspaper space in bulk and reselling it to advertisers for a commission. The commission model he improvised governed agency economics for the next century and a half.
1923Hopkins publishes Scientific Advertising
Claude C. Hopkins, who tracked every campaign with keyed coupons so each ad's sales could be counted, distilled decades of measured results into Scientific Advertising — the founding text of testing culture. David Ogilvy later wrote that nobody should be allowed to touch advertising without reading it seven times.
1931P&G invents brand management
Neil McElroy, a junior Procter & Gamble advertising manager frustrated that Camay was starved of attention next to Ivory, wrote a three-page memo proposing one man and one team fully accountable for each brand, competing internally as if rivals. The memo created the brand manager — the template for the modern marketer. McElroy later became US Secretary of Defense.
1941The first TV commercial
On 1 July 1941, before a Dodgers–Phillies game on New York station WNBT, Bulova paid about nine dollars to air the first legal television commercial: a watch face over a map of America and the words "America runs on Bulova time." Television would dominate marketing budgets within two decades.
1960McCarthy's 4 Ps
E. Jerome McCarthy's textbook Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach compressed the discipline into four controllable levers — product, price, place, promotion. Philip Kotler's Marketing Management (1967) built on it, and together the two books turned a trade taught by apprenticeship into a subject taught in every business school on earth.
1994The first banner ad
On 27 October 1994, HotWired — Wired magazine's website — ran the web's first banner advertisement, an AT&T ad teasing "Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will." Roughly 44 percent of the people who saw it clicked, a rate a thousand times today's norm, and internet advertising began.
2000Google AdWords launches
Google launched AdWords in October 2000 with about 350 advertisers, letting anyone buy text ads against search keywords through a self-serve console; in 2002 it switched to auction-based pay-per-click pricing. Search advertising became the largest ad medium in history and made the auction, not the negotiation, marketing's default price mechanism.
