A history of the persuasion business. From the patent-medicine pages of 19th-century newspapers to the algorithmic targeting of the 2020s — the figures, the agencies, the campaigns, and the arguments.
Paid, identified communication intended to inform, persuade, or remind audiences about products, services, ideas, or organisations.
The industry is older than mass media in a meaningful sense — Roman wall paintings advertised gladiatorial games — but the business as we know it dates from roughly 1840, with the founding of the first agencies in Philadelphia and London. The 20th century turned it into one of the major industries of the developed world. Annual global ad spend in 2025 was approximately $870 billion.
This deck moves chronologically from the founding through the Mad Men era, the creative revolution, the digital transition, and the contemporary algorithmic moment. Plus dedicated chapters on canonical campaigns, the major figures, and the criticism the industry has earned and survived.
The first modern advertising agency was Volney B. Palmer's, founded Philadelphia 1841. Palmer didn't write or design ads — he sold newspaper space on commission to merchants. The 15% media-commission model he pioneered structured the agency-client relationship for the next 150 years.
N. W. Ayer & Son (Philadelphia, 1869) was the first to add creative services. J. Walter Thompson (1864) became the first agency with international offices.
The 19th-century product mix was dominated by patent medicines — alcohol-and-opiate-based "remedies" sold via newspaper advertising before regulation. Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, Hostetter's Stomach Bitters, Coca-Cola (originally a patent medicine, 1886). The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act in the US ended the worst excesses but left advertising as a structural pillar of consumer-product marketing.
The first influential theoretician of advertising. Claude Hopkins (1866–1932) worked at Albert Lasker's Lord & Thomas agency, eventually becoming its president. His Scientific Advertising (1923) is the founding text of testable, response-driven advertising.
Hopkins's contributions: coupon testing (which ad pulled how many response coupons — proto-A/B testing); specific copy claims rather than vague superlatives; reason-why advertising (give the customer a reason); premium offers and sampling as engagement tools.
Hopkins's clients included Pepsodent (he popularised tooth-brushing as a daily habit, building the modern toothpaste market), Quaker Oats, Goodyear, Schlitz Beer ("Schlitz: the beer that made Milwaukee famous").
David Ogilvy later said anyone who wanted to enter the advertising business should read Scientific Advertising "at least seven times."
Radio advertising began with WEAF New York's 1922 broadcasts of paid commercial messages. The A&P Gypsies (1923–) was the first sustained advertiser-sponsored programme. The 1930s "soap opera" — daytime serial dramas sponsored by Procter & Gamble's soap brands — gave the genre its name.
The radio era trained the advertising industry on ear-based messaging: jingles, repetition, brand mascots. Pepsi-Cola hits the spot / Twelve full ounces, that's a lot. Plus the rise of integrated entertainment-advertising packages.
Television advertising launched commercially with the 1941 Bulova watch ad on WNBT — 10 seconds for $9. By 1955, US TV ad spend exceeded radio. The 1950s established the 30- and 60-second TV spot as the format that would dominate American consumer culture for sixty years.
By the 1950s, the major US advertising agencies had concentrated in midtown Manhattan along Madison Avenue. The phrase "Madison Avenue" became metonymic for the advertising industry. The structure that hardened in this period: account services (client management), creative (copywriting and art direction), media (planning and buying), research (consumer testing and effectiveness measurement).
Major 1950s agencies: BBDO, JWT, Y&R (Young & Rubicam), McCann Erickson, Ogilvy & Mather, Leo Burnett (Chicago, but a major presence). The houses that AMC's Mad Men dramatised mostly existed; the boozy chauvinism of the period was, by most surviving accounts, accurate.
The 1950s also produced the first major academic-style critiques: Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957) on motivational research; John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958) on the dependence effect.
Bill Bernbach (1911–1982) and his agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), founded 1949, are at the centre of what came to be called the Creative Revolution. The shift: from research-driven, formula-driven advertising to bold creative concept work that respected the audience's intelligence.
The signature campaign: Volkswagen (1959 onward). The "Think Small" ad — a tiny VW Beetle on a vast white page — broke every Madison Avenue rule about ad density and conventional aspiration. The "Lemon" ad showed a Beetle with the word "Lemon" — and explained that a small chrome strip flaw had caused it to be rejected; the company's quality control would not let it pass. Both ads consistently top "best ads of all time" lists.
DDB pioneered the copywriter-art director team as the basic creative unit (replacing the assembly-line model where writers and designers worked separately). The structure persists in most agencies today.
David Ogilvy (1911–1999), the British copywriter who founded Ogilvy & Mather (1948). His Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963) was the first widely-read insider account of the industry; Ogilvy on Advertising (1983) became the textbook.
Ogilvy's philosophy combined Hopkins's reason-why approach with Bernbach-era creative sensibility. His most-quoted line: "The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife."
The line is dated; the principle — respect the audience's intelligence — has held up.
Signature campaigns: Hathaway Shirts (the eyepatch — bizarre, memorable, drove sales for decades); Rolls-Royce ("At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock" — measured, specific, unbragging); Schweppes (the Commander Whitehead campaign).
Ogilvy's principles: long copy (he was famous for ads with 1,200+ words of body text and the data showing they outperformed short copy), brand image as the central asset, testing rigour.
Leo Burnett (1891–1971) founded his agency in Chicago in 1935. His distinctive contribution: the brand mascot. The Marlboro Man, the Jolly Green Giant, Tony the Tiger, the Pillsbury Doughboy, Charlie the Tuna, Toucan Sam, the Maytag Repairman, Morris the Cat — all came out of Burnett's agency.
The Marlboro campaign is the most-studied. Marlboro began (1924) as a women's filtered cigarette ("Mild as May"). The 1954 Burnett re-launch as a masculine cowboy brand transformed it into the world's best-selling cigarette and produced one of the most successful gender-rebrandings in marketing history.
Burnett's philosophy emphasised inherent drama in the product — find the human truth that connects the brand to lived experience. The mascot was the device for delivering that truth in a memorable form.
Rosser Reeves (1910–1984) at Ted Bates & Company. His 1961 book Reality in Advertising codified the Unique Selling Proposition (USP):
1. Each ad must propose a specific benefit to the consumer.
2. The proposition must be one the competition cannot or does not offer.
3. The proposition must be strong enough to attract new customers to the product.
Reeves's signature work: M&Ms: "Melts in your mouth, not in your hand." Anacin: "Fast, fast, FAST relief." His Anacin commercials were notoriously irritating but extraordinarily effective at moving product.
The USP-vs-Bernbach argument structured advertising theory for decades. The synthesis came with David Ogilvy's brand-image approach (a strong brand carries multiple USPs over time) and was later overtaken by 1990s relationship marketing and 2010s experience-led brand strategy.
The creative revolution that DDB started spread through the 1960s. Mary Wells Lawrence (Wells Rich Greene, 1966) — the first woman to head a major US advertising agency. Jay Chiat (Chiat/Day, 1968, LA — broke the Madison Avenue monopoly).
Notable campaigns: Avis "We try harder" (DDB, 1962 — turning second place into a virtue); Apple's "1984" (Chiat/Day, 1984 — the watershed Super Bowl commercial that announced the Macintosh); the Coca-Cola "Hilltop" ad (1971, "I'd like to teach the world to sing").
The 70s brought the rise of account planning as a discipline (Stanley Pollitt at BMP Boase Massimi Pollitt, London, 1968 — bringing structured consumer research into the creative process), the maturation of media buying as a separate function, and the early waves of feminist and minority critique of industry imagery.
The 1980s broke the three-network US TV market. Cable channels (CNN 1980, MTV 1981, ESPN expansion) split the audience by interest. The mass-market Super Bowl spot remained — and grew more expensive — but advertisers could now target subcultures with previously impossible precision.
The 1980s also produced some of the most-watched ads in history. Wendy's "Where's the beef?" (1984, Clara Peller). Apple's "1984" (Ridley Scott directing). Coca-Cola's "Mean Joe Greene" (1979). "This Is Your Brain on Drugs" (1987, Partnership for a Drug-Free America). "Got Milk?" (1993, Goodby Silverstein).
The 1990s saw the rise of integrated brand-building — Nike's "Just Do It" (Wieden+Kennedy, 1988), Apple's "Think Different" (TBWA\Chiat\Day, 1997). Brand-as-philosophy became the dominant late-20th-century mode.
Wieden+Kennedy (Portland, OR, founded 1982 by Dan Wieden and David Kennedy) became the most influential creative agency of the 1990s and 2000s. Their work for Nike, ESPN, Coca-Cola, and Honda set the late-20th-century creative standard.
"Just Do It" (1988) was Wieden's coinage. The story: he was thinking about death-row inmate Gary Gilmore's last words ("Let's do it") and adapted them. The slogan transformed Nike from a running-shoe brand into a global lifestyle icon. The Bo Jackson "Bo Knows" campaigns (1989+), Michael Jordan's brand work, the "What Sport Has the Power To Do" spots — all out of Wieden.
The agency's distinctive culture — collaborative, anti-hierarchical, located far from Madison Avenue — produced a generation of creative talent. Many of the major 2010s agencies (Strawberry Frog, R/GA in its later form, 72andSunny) trace cultural lineage back to Wieden.
Three Apple campaigns belong in the canon. "1984" (1984, Chiat/Day, Ridley Scott directing) — aired once during Super Bowl XVIII. Famously announced the Macintosh; established the Super Bowl commercial as cultural event. Often cited as the most influential commercial ever made.
"Think Different" (1997, TBWA\Chiat\Day under Jobs's restored leadership). Black-and-white portraits of Einstein, Picasso, Gandhi, Dylan, Lennon. Repositioned a near-bankrupt Apple as the brand for creative outliers.
"Get a Mac" (2006–2009, TBWA\Media Arts Lab). The Mac (Justin Long) and PC (John Hodgman) sketches — 66 ads in three years. The campaign is widely credited with driving the consumer-Mac market resurgence that funded the iPhone era.
Apple's advertising philosophy under Jobs: simplicity, product-as-protagonist, refusal of feature-list selling. The discipline has been imitated more than matched.
A separate tradition runs alongside brand advertising: direct-response, where the ad's effectiveness is measured by immediate purchase response. From mail-order catalogues (Sears, 1888) to TV infomercials (Ron Popeil, 1980s) to digital performance marketing (Google AdWords, 2000+).
The key figures: Lester Wunderman (1920–2019) — coined the term "direct marketing" and built the testable, measurable approach. Drayton Bird — UK direct response. Dan Kennedy — info-marketing.
The direct-response tradition is the ancestor of digital performance marketing. The same questions — which headline pulls more responses, which call-to-action converts, which audience segments respond to which offer — moved from coupon-counting in 1925 to A/B testing in 2005 to algorithmic optimisation in 2025.
The first internet banner ad ran on HotWired, 27 October 1994. It was for AT&T. The click-through rate was 44% — astronomical by any subsequent standard.
The 1990s saw the foundation of internet advertising. DoubleClick (1996) pioneered ad serving and tracking. Yahoo's portal homepage was the first major web property to run advertising at scale.
The dot-com era (1996–2000) ran on display advertising. The bust ended that. The rebuilding came from Google AdWords (2000) — pay-per-click search advertising tied to user intent. AdWords became the most successful advertising product in history and made Google one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Facebook Ads (2007 onward) extended the model to social-graph-based targeting. Together, Google and Facebook captured most of the digital ad market by 2015 and have held it.
By 2010, most digital display advertising was sold not by negotiation but by automated auction. Programmatic advertising via real-time bidding (RTB) means: when a webpage loads, the publisher's ad slot is auctioned among advertisers in 100 milliseconds; the highest bidder's ad appears.
The industry built around it: demand-side platforms (DSPs) for buyers, supply-side platforms (SSPs) for publishers, data management platforms (DMPs) for audience targeting, ad exchanges for the auctions, ad-tech middleware taking 30%+ of the spend in tolls.
The structural critique: most digital ad spend goes through opaque intermediation; ad fraud (bots clicking ads, fake publishers) takes ~10% of programmatic spend; the consumer never agreed to be targeted at this granularity. GDPR (EU 2018) and CCPA (California 2020) attempted to introduce consent and opt-out infrastructure; effectiveness is contested.
The rise of social media reshaped advertising in two ways. First, advertising directly on social platforms — Facebook News Feed ads (2012+), Instagram (acquired 2012, advertising 2013+), TikTok (algorithmic feed advertising at unprecedented scale, 2019+).
Second, the rise of influencer marketing. Sponsored content from creators on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X. The 2010s saw the emergence of an entire creator economy, intermediated by influencer-marketing agencies and platforms (Whalar, GRIN). FTC disclosure requirements (the "#ad" tag) were widely violated and slowly enforced.
The 2020s have seen creator-led brands (Mr. Beast's Feastables; Emma Chamberlain's coffee), creator-as-brand-ambassador relationships now structured as multi-year deals worth tens of millions, and the rise of TikTok-driven viral product launches.
The 2010s exposed the data infrastructure underlying modern digital advertising. The 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal — Facebook user data harvested without consent, allegedly used for political-ad targeting — was the watershed event, but the underlying patterns had been documented for years (Pariser's The Filter Bubble, 2011; Tufekci's writing).
The regulatory response: GDPR (2018), CCPA (2020), Apple's App Tracking Transparency (2021 — required apps to ask permission for tracking; 70%+ of users opted out), Google's deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome (announced 2020, repeatedly delayed; effectively rolled back in 2024 to a user-choice model).
The current state: most cross-site tracking infrastructure is degraded but not eliminated. First-party data (publisher-collected, with explicit consent) has gained value. Server-side tracking has partly replaced browser-side. The privacy fight is ongoing.
The contemporary agency landscape is dominated by a few global holding companies, each owning dozens of agency brands.
WPP (UK; Ogilvy, Wunderman Thompson, Grey, GroupM media). Omnicom (US; BBDO, DDB, TBWA). Interpublic (IPG) (US; McCann, FCB, Mediabrands). Publicis (France; Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett, Publicis media). Dentsu (Japan; integrated regional power).
The agency model is under pressure. The 15% media commission collapsed long ago; today most relationships are fee-based or project-based. In-house creative teams at major brands (Apple, Nike, Coca-Cola) increasingly handle work agencies once owned. Consultancy firms (Accenture, Deloitte Digital, Capgemini) have moved aggressively into marketing services.
The 2024 announced merger of Omnicom and IPG (closed 2025) created the largest holding company in advertising history. The implication: further consolidation is likely.
The 2020s have seen the largest reshaping of the TV advertising market since 1955. Netflix launched an ad-supported tier in 2022; Amazon Prime Video introduced ads in 2024. Disney+ added ads in 2022. By 2025, every major streaming service except Apple TV+ runs advertising.
Connected TV (CTV) advertising combines TV-quality video with digital targeting precision. The market is now larger than linear-TV advertising in the US (2024). The audience is shifting; the ad-buying infrastructure is being rebuilt.
The Super Bowl remains the major linear event ($8 million per 30-second spot in 2025). Outside that, US linear TV is in steep decline. Cable cord-cutting accelerated past 50% household penetration in 2023. Sports rights — particularly the NFL — are the last live TV property with mass simultaneous audience.
Advertising has been criticised continuously since its founding. The arguments worth taking seriously:
Manufactured desire. Galbraith's "dependence effect" — advertising creates the desires it then claims to satisfy. The strong form is implausible (consumers also resist ads); the soft form is real and continuously documented.
Distortion of public information. Advertising-supported media pursues attention, not accuracy. The collapse of advertising-supported journalism in the 2010s is, in part, a consequence of its dependence on a model that rewarded attention over information quality.
Discriminatory targeting. Algorithmic targeting can reproduce or amplify discrimination — housing ads not shown to Black audiences (the 2019 ProPublica investigation); employment ads filtered by gender (the 2018 ACLU complaint). The civil-rights audit at Facebook (2020) documented the scale.
Surveillance economy. Modern targeted advertising depends on a continuous monitoring infrastructure that consumers did not opt into and cannot easily opt out of. The privacy critique has merged with the labour critique (data as uncompensated work).
The empirical literature on advertising effectiveness is messier than the industry's self-presentation suggests. The classic John Wanamaker quote — "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" — remained roughly accurate through the 20th century.
The digital era promised attribution. The 2010s research (Lewis & Reiley 2014; Blake, Nosko, Tadelis 2015) suggested that much of the apparent measured effectiveness of digital advertising was an artefact of ad attribution to consumers who would have purchased anyway.
What works, with reasonable empirical support: brand-building advertising over time (Les Binet and Peter Field's IPA work); ads that produce emotional response (regardless of cognitive recall); distinctive brand assets (Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow); reach over frequency for most categories.
What works less than the industry claims: highly precise targeting (often pays for impressions you'd have got anyway); attribution-window optimisation; "halo effect" claims for digital channels.
The same craft applied outside commercial markets has produced some of advertising's most durable work.
Public-service campaigns. Smokey Bear (1944, USDA Forest Service — "Only YOU can prevent forest fires"). The Crying Indian / "Keep America Beautiful" (1971). "This is your brain on drugs" (1987). The truth.org anti-tobacco campaigns (1998–). UK COVID-19 "Stay home, save lives" (2020).
Political advertising. Eisenhower's 1952 "I Like Ike" — the first major US TV political campaign. LBJ's "Daisy" ad (1964) — aired once. Reagan's "Morning in America" (1984). Obama's 2008 "Yes We Can." The Lincoln Project (2020). Political ads operate under different rules — speed, partisanship, narrower regulation — but use the same craft toolkit.
Charity and NGO. The Children's Television Workshop, Médecins Sans Frontières, the WWF's panda logo (Sir Peter Scott, 1961) — recognised globally as nature-conservation shorthand.
The advertising industry's award circuit is unusually elaborate. Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity (since 1954) — the most prestigious. D&AD (UK, since 1962). The One Show (US, since 1973). Clios. Andys. Effie Awards (effectiveness rather than craft).
Critics within the industry argue the awards have distorted the work — encouraging case-study films and "scam ads" (work that ran briefly to qualify for awards but never had real client commitment). Bob Hoffman's The Ad Contrarian blog made the case persistently. The 2017 introduction of "Glass" and "Sustainable Development Goals" Lions added new categories around social impact, with mixed reception.
What the awards do produce: an annual public archive of work the industry considers exemplary. The Cannes Lions winners reel is one of the better surveys of contemporary commercial creativity available.
↑ The real Mad Men of Chicago · Chicago Stories
Watch · DDB Volkswagen "Snow Plow" (1963)
Watch · David Ogilvy · Essentials
Three forces shape advertising in the late 2020s.
Generative AI. Image and video generation can produce competent ad creative at marginal cost. The 2024 Coca-Cola "Create Real Magic" campaign was the first major brand campaign to use generative AI as the production engine. The labour-displacement concern is real; the early empirical evidence on creative effectiveness is mixed.
Retail media networks. Amazon Advertising (2025 revenue ~$60B) is now the third-largest digital ad business after Google and Meta. Walmart, Kroger, Target, Uber, Doordash all run advertising businesses on their first-party purchase data. The new gatekeepers have store-shelf-equivalent leverage in digital.
Privacy and regulation. The post-cookie landscape continues to consolidate around server-side tracking, first-party data, and clean rooms. EU AI Act (2024) and the regulatory wave that follows will reshape what's permitted.
The industry has survived radio, television, internet, mobile, and social. It will survive AI, but the agencies and the talent mix will look different.
Across 180 years of advertising history, a few principles have held up:
1. Strong creative work, broadly distributed, builds brands more cheaply over time than narrowly-targeted performance work alone. The Binet-Field 60/40 brand-vs-activation rule.
2. Distinctive brand assets (logos, colours, characters, sonic signatures) are the most-leveraged investment a brand makes. They compound over decades. Most brands underinvest.
3. Reach beats frequency for most categories.
4. Emotional response correlates with effectiveness better than rational message recall does.
5. Advertising amplifies what's already happening; it rarely creates demand from nothing. The product, the moment, the cultural readiness — all matter more than the campaign.
The craft has changed channels every generation. The principles haven't.
Advertising History — Volume VII, Deck 12 of The Deck Catalog. Set in Bebas Neue and Helvetica Neue. Newsprint paper at #f0e8d8; red and teal accents.
180 years of the persuasion business across thirty leaves. The industry endures.
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