The evolution of advertisement. Visual & Performing Arts Essay

The Evolution of Advertisement
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Advertising has over the years experienced massive changes from a means of audio or visual communication to now where it is a non-quantifiable entity. This is because it has infiltrated every possible media clothes, music, sports, journals, radio, and television. The advertising industry contains agencies responsible for the advertisement, their preferred media of advertisement and a whole team consisting of editors, researchers, creators, brand managers, designers and the newly phrased term, influencers. Today, there is a lot of effort put in making the communication between the product or service provider and the customer interesting and relatable so that they are persuaded to check out the products. However, the advertisement industry did not always go to this length in influencing the customer’s decision in purchasing a product. Since ancient time, advertisement has been present for instance in ancient Egypt where they wrote sale messages on papyrus, wall and rock paintings in Asia and Africa dating back to 4000 BCE and oral, songs played with bamboo flutes to sell candy in ancient China. CITATION JOS16 \l 1033 (GALLEGOS, 2016) The transformation is jarring when you realize that today, you can sometimes be unable to tell apart an advertisement from a piece of the medium. This essay intends to analyze the history and the evolution of the advertisement industry to what it is today.
By the 18th century, newspaper advertisement as a mode of promoting goods and services was more common. Their approach to the advertisement was rather interesting and they show how the standard has changed throughout the years. Coming across a newspaper from the 18th century, many ads were by so-called doctors promoting the cures and treatment for diseases and pains as a result of normal body functions such as periods. Another mode of promoting businesses was the use of printed trade cards that business owners hoped people would pass them around to their friends and family. It wasn’t until the mid-18th century that people started to grasp the reason for the advertisement. Newspaper copywriters in Scotland were among the first people to realize that advertisement was not intended to so much provide information about the seller rather, excite the reader with the prospect and advantages of owning the product being sold. This pioneered a world where writers would manipulate the language and bring out a sense of conviction and trust to paint the manufacture and the product in a positive light. This was done by providing written testimonies from respected practitioners in certain fields and by having endorsements from the government.
This approach to marketing started with the medical products and renowned local physicians played a part in the success of the strategy. Also, newspaper publishers realized that manufacturers and service providers were ready to offer them money in exchange for promotion and attention for their products. By the beginning of the 19th century, women were the advertisement new targets with an increase in beauty product emphasis and consequently, a rising demand. Despite coming up with a winning formula, there was still one major hurdle that limited the press from fully enacting this strategy. CITATION Bra20 \l 1033 (Brandtzæg, 2020) Heavy taxation was rampant because the advertisement was a major source of revenue for the governments mostly in the UK. It was also a form of punishment for the press outlets that criticized the government or failed to document their ideologies. In the United States, however, the use of newspaper advertisements increased rapidly because they were not faced with heavy taxes, unlike their UK counterparts. Also, people in the US read the newspaper more as it was almost four times cheaper than those in the UK. With the ideas around effective advertisement changing, it made it easier for its inclusion in other mediums of existence,
Newspapers and magazines pave the way for television and with the increase in affluence levels and spending power, it was only a matter of time until television became a dominant advertisement force. Branding was revolutionized because images of the products drove more sales. Manufactures put more effort into containers, labels and coming up with appealing names for their products. By 1980, television introduces satellite and cable subscription services that offered niche content making the consumers spoilt for choice and the TV networks even more competitive to grab a hold of a certain audience. To keep a hold of an audience, they needed enjoyable content that was both entertaining and informative. The need for information and culture became integral to people as can be seen in the game Trivial Pursuit, a popular Canadian game that involves measuring a person’s intelligence based on their knowledge of general knowledge. As a result, mediatized knowledge and content became conflated with intelligence and brought up practices and beliefs that are still relevant today. CITA...