The Origin of Advertising: From Ancient Merchants to Modern Marketing

If someone asked you, “What was the world’s very first advertisement?”, what would you say? You might picture a YouTube ad filling your smartphone screen, or a banner sprawled across a portal website. But humanity was already delivering the message of “buy what I’m selling” long before the invention of writing. Advertising is not merely a marketing technique — it is a vast history of communication that has grown alongside human civilization itself.

Where there was trade, there was advertising. And where there was advertising, there was civilization. From a papyrus note in ancient Egypt to the frescoes of Pompeii, from Gutenberg’s printing press to radio and television, and onward to Google and social media — the history of advertising is also the story of how humanity has come to understand the world and influence one another.

The First Advertisement Written on Papyrus: Ancient Egypt

Tracing advertising back to its origins leads us to ancient Egypt around 3000 BCE. The British Museum preserves a papyrus advertisement excavated from the ruins of Thebes (modern-day Luxor). The text is brief but striking: a textile merchant offered a reward for the return of a runaway slave while simultaneously promoting his own shop.^[1]

This small piece of papyrus is remarkably modern. The technique of combining a wanted notice with a business promotion to catch the reader’s eye is something we see commonly in social media marketing today. No sooner had humanity learned to write than it put that skill to commercial use.

Beyond papyrus, ancient Egypt made active use of murals and obelisks to deliver public messages. Relief carvings recording a pharaoh’s military victories and inscriptions carved into temple walls were a form of “national branding” — endlessly repeating the message that “the king is divine, and this kingdom is great.”^[2]

Selling Through Sound, Announcing Through Images: Ancient Greece and Rome

The cities of ancient Greece and Rome were as bustling as any modern commercial district. The marketplaces (the agora and the forum) rang with merchants’ calls, and men known as “town criers” roamed the streets announcing products and events.^[1]

Because many people were unable to read, merchants relied on pictures and signboards. A shoe shop hung a sign in the shape of a shoe; a blacksmith displayed a hammer; a tavern put up grapevines or wine barrels. Images crossed language barriers, and these early signs can be considered the forerunners of modern pictograms.^[2]

Particularly noteworthy are the advertising messages found on ancient Greek pottery. In the sixth century BCE, the ceramics artist Euthymides inscribed on one of his amphorae the taunt directed at his rival Euphronios: “as never Euphronios” (ὡς οὐδέποτε Εὐφρόνιος).[3b] This could be seen as the world’s earliest example of comparative advertising.

Pompeii: An Advertising Museum Frozen in Time

When the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE buried Pompeii under ash in an instant, it paradoxically left humanity an extraordinary legacy. The city, south of Naples in Italy, preserves advertisements from the Roman era over 2,000 years ago in near-perfect condition.^[3]

Walking through the streets of Pompeii, one can vividly feel the commercial energy of the day. Bakery walls displayed price lists and menus; taverns listed their wine selections; near the bathhouses, opening hours were painted on. Over 3,000 electoral slogans were discovered as well, demonstrating just how actively Romans visualized political messages.^[3]

The thermopolia (thermopolium — Roman fast-food establishments) in Pompeii retain wall paintings depicting their menus. Not fundamentally different from the menu boards of today’s fast-food chains, these images prove that advertising served the same purpose 2,000 years ago: presenting options to consumers and encouraging purchases.^[4]

Print Liberates Advertising: From the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era

In medieval Europe, advertising relied primarily on word of mouth. On market days, crowds packed the town square, and merchants shouted their wares at the top of their lungs. Because very few people could read, written advertising had limited reach.^[5]

Then, around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the metal-type printing press changed everything. Once mass production of printed materials became possible, advertisements could reach multiple recipients simultaneously.^[6]

In 1477, English printer William Caxton produced a handbill promoting a collection of church laws and posted it on the door of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Recorded as the first printed advertisement published in English, its content was simple — but it was the opening shot of an era of written advertising aimed at the many.^[6]

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the forms known as “pamphlets” and “broadsheets” spread across Europe. Thanks to the printing press, an advertising message, once composed, could be replicated hundreds or thousands of times. In Germany in 1591, a book advertisement appeared in a news-book — one of the earliest advertisements ever printed in a newspaper.^[5]

The Song Dynasty’s Legacy in Commercial Advertising

China’s contribution to the history of advertising cannot be overlooked. Particularly remarkable is the legacy left by the Song Dynasty (宋朝), which ruled from 960 to 1279.

The Liu family needle shop in Jinan, Shandong Province, had an advertising printing plate made of bronze. The plate was engraved with a rabbit-shaped logo along with phrases such as “high-quality needles” and “special discounts.” Now housed in the National Museum of China, this bronze plate is recognized as the oldest surviving printed commercial advertisement.^[7]

What is striking is that this advertisement already incorporated all three elements of modern advertising: visual branding, emphasis on quality, and price competitiveness. It is fascinating to think that a needle-shop merchant in China 900 years ago was wrestling with the same concerns as today’s marketers.

Newspapers and Magazines: The Golden Age of Advertising

As the eighteenth century began, newspapers spread rapidly across Europe and the New World. On April 24, 1704, the Boston News-Letter carried an advertisement announcing a real-estate listing on Long Island. This is recorded as the first newspaper advertisement in the United States.^[8]

The arrival of newspaper advertising transformed the commercial landscape. In the early days, practical content dominated — real estate, shipping schedules, and lost-and-found notices — but after the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, consumer-goods advertising exploded. As factory-produced goods flooded the market, competition between brands intensified.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a pivotal figure emerged in the history of soap advertising. Thomas Barratt, the head of Pears Soap in Britain, had the revolutionary idea of using painter John Everett Millais’s oil painting Bubbles in an advertisement. One of the earliest examples of an artwork being appropriated for commercial advertising, this campaign marked the beginning of modern advertising’s appeal to emotion and aesthetics.^[9]

During this period, the advertising industry began down the path of professionalization. In 1864, James Walter Thompson founded an advertising agency in the United States that grew steadily, laying the groundwork for the modern advertising agency model. The concept of a “full-service agency” — creating creative content for advertisers and purchasing media space on their behalf — made its first appearance at this time.^[10]

Advertising in the Edo Period: East and West Converge

While print advertising was flourishing in the West, advertising culture also blossomed in Japan during the Edo period (1603–1868). In the busy commercial districts of Edo (present-day Tokyo), shops in every trade hung their own noren (暖簾, fabric shop dividers) and signboards, and handbills printed using woodblock techniques were distributed in the streets.

This 1806 handbill promoted a herbal remedy called Kinseitō, specifying the medicine’s effects and price. What is remarkable is that this advertisement was a product of Japan’s independently developed printing technology, entirely uninfluenced by Gutenberg.^[11] The fact that East and West, developing along entirely different paths, both arrived at the same human need for “advertising” suggests that advertising is not a product of any particular culture, but a universal human phenomenon.

Edward Bernays: The Man Who Engineered Desire

In the early twentieth century, advertising evolved from simply “announcing products” to “manipulating consumer psychology.” The central figure who drove this transformation was Edward Bernays (1891–1995).

A nephew of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, Bernays found in his uncle’s theories a golden principle applicable to advertising: people make purchasing decisions not out of “need” but out of “desire.” He exploited this commercially, pioneering a new field he called “Public Relations (PR).”^[12]

One of Bernays’s most famous campaigns was conducted for a tobacco company in the 1920s. At the time, women smoking in public was taboo. Bernays linked the women’s suffrage movement to cigarettes, promoting them as “Torches of Freedom.” By pulling a social issue — women’s liberation — into commercial advertising, the campaign achieved enormous success while simultaneously sparking serious ethical controversy.^[12]

Bernays’s approach went on to become the industry standard. The core philosophy of modern marketing — selling not products but lifestyles, not function but image and emotion — traces its origins back to him.

Into Homes Through the Airwaves: Radio and TV Advertising

In the 1920s, the emergence of radio triggered another revolution in the history of advertising. On August 28, 1922, the world’s first radio advertisement was broadcast on WEAF, a New York radio station. Commissioned by a Long Island real-estate company, this ten-minute advertisement cost $50 in airtime fees.^[13]

Radio made advertising a “hearing experience” for the first time. While print advertisements could only reach those who could read, radio advertisements could deliver a brand’s name and message even to those who could not. As radio penetrated most American households during the 1930s, advertising reached national audiences simultaneously for the very first time.^[13]

Television elevated advertising to yet another dimension. On July 1, 1941, the world’s first legally sanctioned television commercial aired on WNBT, an NBC-affiliated station in the United States. Commissioned by Bulova Watch Company, this ten-second advertisement overlaid an image of a watch onto a map of the United States with the tagline “America runs on Bulova time.” The airtime fee was nine dollars.^[14]

Television advertising’s greatest innovation was the “combination of moving images and sound.” Consumers could now see products being used as if in real life; background music and narration were added, and advertisements became miniature dramas. As television became widespread through the 1950s and 1960s, advertising cemented its role as a central tool in shaping consumer culture.

Uniting the World: The Digital and Internet Advertising Revolution

On October 27, 1994, the history of internet advertising began. An AT&T banner advertisement appeared on HotWired, the website of Wired magazine. With the provocative tagline “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here?”, this advertisement achieved a click-through rate of 44%.[15a]

Internet advertising was fundamentally unlike any advertising that had come before. While traditional advertising broadcast messages to an undifferentiated mass audience, internet advertising could analyze individual consumers’ interests and behavioral patterns and deliver tailored messages to each.

In the 2000s, with the rise of Google and Facebook, the advertising paradigm shifted completely. Google introduced “search advertising,” identifying user interests through search terms and displaying relevant ads accordingly. Facebook unveiled “targeted advertising,” analyzing users’ profile and behavioral data.^[15] By 2022, global advertising expenditure reached approximately $780 billion, with over 60% of that spent on digital advertising.^[16]

The Impact of Advertising on Society and Culture

Looking back across 5,000 years of advertising history, it becomes clear that advertising never remained a simple tool for selling goods. Advertising has been a force that reflects the values of its era — and simultaneously shapes them.

Advertising played a decisive role in forming the Western consumer culture of the twentieth century. By incessantly delivering the message that “a better life comes from more consumption,” advertising contributed to building the consumption-centered society we know today. At the same time, advertising has long faced criticism for reproducing stereotypes around gender, race, and class.

And yet there are also instances where advertising has served as a catalyst for social change. Benetton’s provocative social advertisements in the 1990s brought taboo subjects — AIDS, racism, and war — into the public sphere. Today, many brands embed values of environment, diversity, and inclusion in their advertising to convey social messages.

Conclusion: Advertising as Humanity’s Mirror

The advertisement that an ancient Egyptian merchant scratched onto papyrus still carries, 5,000 years later, the same essential message: “Pay attention to me — what I have is what you want.”

As technology advances, advertising has become more sophisticated, more personalized, and more omnipresent. But its essence has always resided at the intersection of human desire and social communication. The Roman who inscribed an electoral slogan on the walls of Pompeii and the Silicon Valley engineer designing smartphone algorithms today are ultimately standing before the same question: “How do we move people’s hearts?”

The history of advertising is humanity’s 5,000-year answer to that question — and a story that is still being written.