The History of Advertising: A Timeline of Its Evolution

Painted walls: where the history of advertising starts

Walk down the Via dell’Abbondanza in Pompeii and the walls still talk. Red and black painted notices urge citizens to vote for one candidate or another, announce gladiator shows and point the way to rooms for rent. The eruption of 79 CE sealed them under ash, which is why they survived when most ancient street messages did not.

These notices were written by professional sign painters, often working at night, and some were painted over and replaced once the election had passed. That cycle of putting up, covering and repainting is the oldest pattern in the history of advertising. A message lasts only as long as somebody pays to keep it in front of passers-by.

Town criers did the same work out loud. Medieval European towns licensed criers to announce lost property, new laws and goods for sale, and shop signs did the rest for people who could not read. A carved boot, a painted bush for a tavern or three balls for a pawnbroker told the street what was sold inside.

Print arrives: handbills, newspapers and paid notices

Movable type changed the economics. After Johannes Gutenberg’s press began work in Mainz in the 1450s, one notice could be copied hundreds of times. Around 1477, William Caxton printed a small handbill in Westminster offering copies of a priests’ manual. It is generally treated as the oldest surviving printed advertisement in English, and two copies still exist.

Caxton’s slip ends with a Latin request not to tear it down. He expected it pinned to a door or wall, so the first printed ad in English already knew about the problem every poster since has faced. People remove things. Two copies survive, one at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and one at the John Rylands Library in Manchester.

One detail from Caxton still applies. His handbill promised that the copies on sale were set in the same type as the notice itself, so a buyer could judge the product from the ad. A sample that doubles as proof is the same logic behind the free trial, the demo video and the grocery tasting counter today.

Newspapers turned the handbill into a regular product. The Boston News-Letter, launched in April 1704, invited paid notices in its first issue and printed its first advertisements within weeks, for property and goods. In Canada, the Halifax Gazette appeared on 23 March 1752, and an offer of butter for sale in it counts as the country’s first formal advertisement.

Posters, colour and the brand name

Colour lithography put advertising onto the street at full size. In Paris from the 1860s, Jules Chéret produced bright, crowded posters for theatres, cafés and products, and by 1891 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had made his Moulin Rouge poster. Advertising suddenly looked like art, and collectors started peeling posters from walls before the paste had dried.

Brand names needed legal protection to be worth building. Britain’s Trade Marks Registration Act of 1875 led to the Bass brewery’s red triangle being registered in 1876, often called the first British registered trade mark. In Ohio on September 4, 1877, Henry Seymour filed the Quaker figure, the first trademark for a breakfast cereal.

From that point a product could carry a face, a colour and a name that competitors could not copy. Packaged goods replaced loose flour and soap scooped from a barrel, and the package itself became an ad. Much of the later evolution of slogans, logos and mascots grows from this legal change in the 1870s, which is easy to overlook.

Radio gives the product a voice

Radio added sound and, briefly, intimacy. Canada issued its first radio transmitting licence in 1919 to Marconi’s station XWA in Montreal. In New York on August 28, 1922, WEAF aired a paid talk for the Queensboro Corporation, which was selling apartments in Jackson Heights. It is usually cited as the first paid radio commercial.

Sponsors soon learned that a tune outlasted a sales talk. On Christmas Eve 1926, a quartet sang a Wheaties song live on Minneapolis station WCCO, and General Mills calls it radio’s first singing advertisement. Its successors are traced in the guide to advertising jingles and how they took over radio.

Through the 1930s, whole programs carried a sponsor’s name, and soap makers paid for the daytime dramas that are still called soap operas. The advertiser often wrote or produced the show itself. That arrangement shaped how audiences thought about advertising for decades: as the price of free entertainment, paid for with a few minutes of attention.

Television and the 30-second spot

Television arrived with a modest price tag. On July 1, 1941, WNBT in New York aired a ten-second Bulova spot before a baseball game at Ebbets Field. A clock face sat over a map of the United States while an announcer said America runs on Bulova time. Bulova reportedly paid $9, and roughly 4,000 sets could pick it up.

CBC opened television stations in Montreal and Toronto in 1952, and Canadian advertisers moved quickly. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, they were spending $50 million a year on television within eight years of its arrival. The single-sponsor show gave way in both countries to short spots sold between programs, and the 30-second commercial became the standard unit.

Television also created the ad as an event. The modern version is the Super Bowl, where brands now premiere work they hope people will discuss the next morning. The long run of those spots, from the 1984 computer launch to the 2026 AI wave, is covered in the history of Super Bowl commercials and their best moments.

The creative revolution and its famous campaigns

By the late 1950s, many ads shouted. Then a Volkswagen print campaign from 1959 used a tiny photo of a Beetle, acres of white space and a headline telling readers to think small. In 1999, Advertising Age ranked it the top campaign of the twentieth century, and the self-mocking tone it made acceptable still runs through advertising today.

The decade that followed, often called the creative revolution, is told in the guide to 1960s advertising and the Mad Men era. Its core idea was simple. Writers and art directors worked as pairs, copy admitted flaws, and humour replaced the hard sell. In 1962 Avis turned being number two into a selling point.

Not all of it aged well. Cigarette and diet ads from that period now read as warnings. The best work of the era survives because it treated readers as clever. A longer list, from Coca-Cola’s hilltop choir to Apple’s 1984 launch, sits in the ranking of famous advertising campaigns of all time.

Slogans, mascots and jingles: the evolution of memory devices

Three tools did most of the remembering for brands in the twentieth century. Slogans compressed an argument into a handful of words. Mascots gave a product a personality that could age, change clothes and appear on cereal boxes. Jingles used melody to slip a brand name into a listener’s head, where it could stay for life.

Each has its own history on this site. The guide to famous slogans and the brands behind them runs from Coca-Cola’s pause that refreshes in 1929 to McDonald’s i’m lovin’ it in 2003. The history of brand mascots, from Bibendum to Duo the owl starts with a stack of tyres in Lyon in 1894.

These devices share one weakness. They can go stale or offensive while the brand stays in business. PepsiCo retired the Aunt Jemima name in 2021 because the character rested on a racial stereotype, and KFC paused its finger lickin’ good line in 2020 during the pandemic. Memory is useful until the thing remembered no longer fits.

The internet and the clickable banner

On October 27, 1994, the HotWired website went live with paid banners, and the one from AT&T is the most famous. It asked whether you had ever clicked your mouse right here, and promised that you will. Reported click-through rates reached 44 percent. Today’s typical banner gets clicked by a few people in every ten thousand.

Search changed the model again. Google launched AdWords in October 2000, and advertisers began paying for intent rather than space: a person typing a question had already said what they wanted. For the first time, the cost of an ad could be tied directly to a response, not to an estimate of how many people might have seen it.

Print did not vanish, but it shrank. Statistics Canada reported in November 2025 that newspaper publishers’ print advertising sales fell by just over a third between 2022 and 2024, to $407.7 million. The craft of the printed page still matters, and the guide to print ads that people still study shows why.

Social video, virality and the street stunt

Social platforms added a second kind of distribution. A brand could make something, post it and hope people passed it along for free. Old Spice released The Man Your Man Could Smell Like online in February 2010 and then answered fans with 186 short personalized videos. Body wash sales reportedly doubled by that July.

Not every success came from a screen. Brands hid messages in bus shelters, painted crosswalks and staged stunts for the people who happened to walk past, then filmed the reactions for everyone else. That overlap between the street and the feed is covered in the guides to guerrilla marketing examples and viral marketing campaigns that worked.

Here is a small digression worth having. In 1874, a London writer named Henry Sampson published A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times, more than 600 pages long. He complained about quack medicine notices and fake testimonials. Read today, his complaints sound almost exactly like modern worries about influencer posts that forget to mention they were paid.

AI in advertising and the 2026 Super Bowl

Generative tools arrived in mainstream advertising fast. Coca-Cola remade its 1995 Holidays Are Coming commercial with AI in November 2024 and drew complaints about glitchy trucks and lifeless faces. It returned with new AI versions in 2025 anyway. Dove went the other way in April 2024, pledging never to use AI to represent real women in its ads.

Super Bowl LX, played on February 8, 2026, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, showed where the money had moved. OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta and Anthropic all bought airtime, and vodka brand SVEDKA described its spot as the first primarily AI-generated Super Bowl ad. NBCUniversal sold 30-second slots at an average of about $8 million.

The ad that topped the USA Today Ad Meter, though, was Budweiser’s American Icons, with Clydesdales and a bald eagle. Audiences still rewarded the familiar. The full story of how brands now use these tools, and where viewers push back, is told in the guide to AI in advertising as of 2026.

Canada’s own advertising timeline

Canada’s history of advertising runs parallel to the American one but on its own clock. The Halifax Gazette carried that butter notice in 1752. Eaton’s printed its first catalogue for visitors to the Toronto Industrial Exhibition in 1884, and the last one went out in spring 1976, after years of losses in the mail-order business.

Broadcasting regulation followed its own path too. The Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, forerunner of the CBC, was created in 1932, and the Broadcasting Act of 1968 established the CRTC. Paid advertising was dropped from CBC radio in the mid-1970s. Canadian content rules shaped which commercials were made at home rather than imported from the United States.

The best-known modern Canadian spot is Molson Canadian’s The Rant, which debuted during the Academy Awards broadcast in March 2000. A man named Joe walks to a microphone, listing what makes him Canadian. In 2025, during the trade dispute with the United States, the ad circulated again online. More are in Canadian commercials people still quote.

A history of advertising timeline in one table

The dates below are the ones most often used as markers. Several are contested, since earlier examples sometimes turn up in local records, and the table keeps to the versions documented by museums, broadcasters, national encyclopedias and the brands themselves. A fuller year-by-year version lives on the advertising timeline by decade.

Look at the gaps between rows instead of the rows themselves. Print had roughly four centuries to settle its conventions before radio arrived, and radio had barely twenty years before television. The web banner and the AI-generated spot are separated by about three decades, and the formats in between, from pop-ups to stories, rarely lasted long.

What the evolution of advertising has not changed

Every medium in this timeline began by copying the one before it. Early radio ads read like newspaper copy aloud, early television ads were filmed radio, and early banners were tiny posters. Each step in that evolution took about a decade to find what the new medium could do that the old one could not.

The other constant is suspicion. Henry Sampson in 1874, the regulators who set up the CRTC in 1968 and the court that approved Red Bull’s $13 million settlement over its wings slogan in 2014 all worried about the same thing. How much can a seller claim before a promise becomes a lie? That question is still open in 2026.

It is unlikely to close soon. The newest ads are written with the help of the same chatbots that bought airtime in February 2026, and a viewer can no longer always tell whether the face on screen belongs to a person. Pompeii’s sign painters signed some of their work by name. Will the next generation of advertising sign its own?