Print Ads: Famous Examples From a 1477 Handbill to the Absolut Bottle

What print ads still do better than screens

A printed page holds still. Nobody can skip it after five seconds, and the reader decides how long to look. That is why print ads can carry long copy, small type and jokes that only land on a second read. Screen formats can be clever, but they rarely allow the slow look that a magazine spread invites.

Print also lasts. A page can be torn out, pinned to a fridge, filed or framed, and some of the famous examples below survive because someone kept the actual paper. The trade-off is measurement. A printed ad cannot report how many people saw it, so its success was judged for centuries by sales and by guesswork.

Famous print ads before photography

The oldest surviving printed advertisement in English is a small handbill William Caxton produced in Westminster around 1477, offering copies of a priests’ manual at his shop. It ends with a Latin request not to remove the notice, so it was meant to be pinned up in public. Copies survive at the Bodleian Library and at Reading.

Newspapers made print ads routine. The Boston News-Letter printed paid notices from its first weeks in 1704, and the Halifax Gazette, Canada’s first newspaper, carried an offer of butter in 1752. By the late nineteenth century, Jules Chéret’s colour posters filled Paris streets, and Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge poster of 1891 showed that an ad could also be art.

War posters as print ads

Recruitment posters borrowed every trick of commercial print. In September 1914, a British magazine cover drawn by Alfred Leete showed Lord Kitchener pointing straight at the reader, and the image became a poster. The American version followed in 1917, with James Montgomery Flagg’s Uncle Sam saying I Want You above the same outstretched finger.

The pointing finger is a printing trick, not a painting one. Because the hand is drawn foreshortened and the eyes look directly out, the figure seems to follow a passer-by along the street. Few printed images have been copied more often in commercial work, and versions of that pose still turn up in parodies.

Print ad examples from the 1950s and 1960s

Rolls-Royce ran one of the most quoted headlines in 1958: at sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise in the new car came from the electric clock. The ad then listed specific facts about the car in plain paragraphs. Its power came from one checkable detail rather than an adjective, a technique students of print ads still copy.

Volkswagen went further in 1959 with Think Small. A tiny Beetle sat near the top of a page of white space, and the copy admitted the car was small and modest. A follow-up ad called a car a lemon because of a blemished chrome strip on its glove compartment. Advertising Age later ranked the campaign the best of the century.

These examples changed print layout as much as copywriting. Big photos, short headlines and clean grids replaced crowded pages full of drawings. The era is covered in 1960s advertising and the creative revolution, and the type choices that made these pages so readable connect to the basics in typography for beginners.

A simple exercise shows why these examples are still taught. Cover the headline of either one and the picture says almost nothing. Cover the picture instead and the headline still works. In the best print ads of that period, the words carry the idea and the image proves it, which is the reverse of most poster design before them.

Absolut and the print ad that never ended

Absolut began its bottle series in 1980 with a photograph of the bottle under a halo and the words Absolut Perfection. The brand then repeated the idea for about twenty-five years, producing more than 1,500 executions. Each one hid the bottle’s outline somewhere: in a swimming pool, a city skyline or a garden hedge.

The series is famous partly because it suited magazines so well. Readers began collecting the pages, and the campaign turned a little-known Swedish vodka into an international brand. It also proved that one format, repeated with discipline, could stay fresh for decades. The wider context sits in the list of famous advertising campaigns.

The famous print ad that probably never ran

One of the most quoted print ads in history may not exist. It reads, in most versions: men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. It is usually credited to the explorer Ernest Shackleton and dated to The Times in 1913. Nobody has found it there.

Polar historians have offered a reward for the original, and it has never been claimed. The wording first appears in print decades later, and crew accounts of applying make no mention of an ad. You will still see it in marketing books as a model of honest copy, which is a lesson of its own about checking sources.

Print ads in Canada, as of 2026

Canada’s most influential print advertising was arguably the Eaton’s catalogue. Timothy Eaton printed the first one for visitors to the Toronto Industrial Exhibition in 1884, and the company issued its last one for spring and summer 1976, after years of losses. For rural households, it was the main window onto city goods for almost a century.

The business has shrunk since then. Statistics Canada reported in November 2025 that newspaper publishers’ print advertising sales fell by 34.3 percent between 2022 and 2024, to $407.7 million. Even so, the format keeps surfacing in flyers, local papers and glossy magazines, and the next Think Small will still need only a page.