History of advertising
aspect of history
The history of advertising can be traced to ancient civilizations. It became a major force in capitalist economies in the mid-19th century, based primarily on newspapers and magazines. In the 20th century, advertising grew rapidly with new technologies such as direct mail, radio, television, the internet, and mobile devices.
Between 1919 and 2007 advertising averaged 2.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product in the United States.
Pre-modern history
Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages and wall posters. Commercial messages and political campaign displays have been found in the ruins of Pompeii and Arabia. Lost and found advertising on papyrus was common in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Wall or rock painting for commercial advertising is another manifestation of an ancient advertising form, which is present to this day in many parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. The tradition of wall painting can be traced back to Indian rock art paintings that date back to 4000 BCE.
In ancient China, the earliest advertising known was oral, as recorded in the Classic of Poetry (11th to 7th centuries BCE) of bamboo flutes played to sell candy. Advertisement usually took the form of calligraphic signboards and inked papers.
“History of advertising” enters the record as aspect of history. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what History, advertising and aspect can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“History of advertising” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, History, advertising and aspect provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3137306. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1919 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “History of advertising” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.