As America recovered from the
Civil War (1861-1865), commerce and newspapers once again took their place in
the society. In the 1860s and 1870s, the forerunners of modern advertising agents
came in to act. Two of the earliest agencies were N. W. Ayer in Philadelphia
and J. Walter Thompson in New York. These agencies collected circulation
figures of newspapers and magazines and based their commissions on readership.
James Gordon Bennett, publisher
of the New York Herald, keyed onto the idea of raising the cost of
advertisements to lower the cost of newspapers, a practice that continues into
the present. He put an end to the endless repetition of ads from issue to issue
that had characterized American newspapers from the colonial period well into
the 19th century. Lacking radio and TV and having only a few magazines, a
newspaper would have been valued and considered over. Bennett and other
newspapermen were developing the newspaper in Eastern cities as a mass medium
for advertising. It was a short step from media placement to another service
that marked the beginnings of modern advertising, marking the beginnings of a
shift away from direct sales techniques to mass-communicated advertising.
Around the turn of the 20th
century, public dissatisfaction with fraud and unregulated advertising
increased. Letters to the editors of magazines and newspapers and occasional
articles challenged the false promises directly and called for regulation and
change in marketing practices.
World War I accelerated the
technological developments that led to its becoming a medium of mass communication.
Radio stations were up and running in the world's major cities by the late
1920s. Few innovations transformed the nature of advertising as fundamentally
as radio. Only television and the Internet would prove so revolutionary.
Radio released advertising from
its relationship to literacy by communicating through music, jingles, and the
spoken word. Advertising agencies were skeptical at first, but soon radio became
their newest medium. Early radio stars frequently delivered the commercial
messages during their shows. This merger of programming and advertising has
reemerged more recently in the form of product placement in television, movies,
and sporting events.
Commercial television developed
after World War II. By the late 1940s, cities like New York, Chicago, and Los
Angeles had functioning local television stations. By the early 1950s, three
major networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) supplied national programming.
American advertising took an
international turn around in 1900 when American businesses looked to
advertising agencies to sell their products abroad. Both N.W. Ayer and J.
Walter Thompson had Spanish-language departments that translated
English-language ads and sent them off to newspapers and magazines in Latin
America. The Internet became an essential part of American society in the
1990s. Computers replaced typewriters and email established itself as a
necessity.
Viewing options were limited until
the arrival of cable television in the 1970s and audiences were broad. Ads on
cable, because of the increased specialized programming, created more targeted
groups of viewers with more narrowly defined interests. Broadcasting became
narrow-casting, and advertising became more focused as well. The Internet
narrows the aim further, not reaching households but targeting individuals.
Marketers use Internet surfing habits to establish the interests and buying
habits of individuals, making advertising more efficient.
Advertising has been very
innovative in the past in finding ways to communicate promotional messages. As
technology has evolved, it has revolutionized advertising techniques as well as
changing the social landscape. There is no reason to suspect that advertising
will not continue to reinvent itself, discover new media, and develop new
techniques.
