ADVERTISING, the process of disseminating information for commercial purposes. Advertisement has existed from early times. Traders made themselves known and called attention to their products by mural inscriptions before the age of printing: a papyrus, discovered at Thebes offering a reward for a runaway slave, is reputed to be 3,00o years old.
The public crier, a civic institution in ancient Greece, is not yet extinct. In the middle ages the spoken word was almost the only mode of publicity in use. The invention of printing ushered in the modern period of advertising. The Bodleian library has a small poster or broadside by William Caxton, 7in. by 5in., adver tising a service-book, "The Pyes of Salisbury Use" for sale at the Red Pole in the almonry of Westminster. It was issued in 1480. Printing alone made possible the transition from simple an nouncement to the system of argument and suggestion which constitutes modern advertising, and the medium of this develop ment was the newspaper. The Mercuries or weekly papers some times carried a few advertisements, including the first offerings of coffee (1652), chocolate (1657) and tea (1658).
In June 1666 the London Gazette, No. 62, announced the first advertisement-supplement, as follows : "An Advertisement— Being daily prest to the publication of Books, Medicines, and other things not properly the business of a Paper of Intelli gence. This is to notifie once for all, that we will not charge the Gazette with Advertisements, unless they be matter of state ; but that a Paper of Advertisements will be forthwith printed apart, and recommended to the Publick by another hand." In No. 94 of the same journal, published in Oct. 1666, there appeared a suggestion that sufferers from the Great Fire of London should avail themselves of this means of publicity: "Such as have settled in new habitations since the late Fire and desire for the convenience of their correspondence to publish the place of their present abode, or to give Notice of Goods lost or found, may repair to the corner House in Bloomsbury on the East Side of the Great Square, before the House of the Right Honourable of the Lord Treasurer, where there is care taken for the Receipt and Publication of such Advertisements." Clearly, the restriction of the word "advertisement," which for Shakespeare and the translators of the Authorized Version had meant information of any kind, to a business announcement was in The Tatler of Sept. 14, 1710: "It is my custom, in a dearth of News, to entertain myself with those Collections of Advertisements that appear at the end of all our Publick Prints. . . . Advertisements are of great use to the vulgar. First of all, as they are instruments of ambition. A man that is by no means big enough for the Gazette may easily creep into the advertisements. . . . A second use which this sort of writings have been turned to of late Years, has been the management of Controversy. . . . The inventors of Strops for Razors have written against one another in this way for several years. The third and last of these writings is to inform the World where they may be furnished with almost everything that is necessary for Life. If a Man has Pains in His head, Cholic in his Bowels, or spots in his Cloathes, he may here meet with proper Cures and Remedies. If a Man would recover a Wife or a Horse that is stolen or strayed; if he wants new Sermons, Electuaries, Asses' milk, or anything else, either for his Body or his Mind, this is the place to look for them in." By the middle of the century, advertisements began to be complained of, and the stains which the practice of that age left upon its reputation are not yet quite obliterated. In The Idler Jan. 20, I 7 58, Dr. Johnson has: "Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick. Promise, large prom ise, is the soul of an advertisement. I remember a washball that had a quality truly wonderful—it gave an exquisite edge to the razor! . . . The trade of advertising is now so near to perfec tion that it is not easy to propose any improvement."