I have a tale said Advertising!!!

Make me renowned murmured one

Hold my hands whispered the other

And then began the journey

Of the so-called mighty advertisements

The camera slowly fades to black and then fades into the Land of Pyramids and Pharaohs set in 2000 BC. Hurrah!!! You guessed it right, we are at Egypt, the fa?ade of the immense sepulchre, where even the blowing wind holds the key of mysteries, unlocked. 

Let’s start with that usual cliché phrase.

Once upon a time there lived a man in Cairo, who desperately needed public attention to help dwellers of a nearby village who were deleteriously affected by natural havoc that shook the valley a few days before. The man was inherently mute and had debilitated legs, hence spent most of his time painting and etching steel carvings. The benevolent knew his inadequacy in orally conveying the same with his populace and thought of multifarious ways to interpret his vision. Finally, one got clicked to his mind which gave perfect sense to his intellect. The artist then took his brush which then portrayed the disaster happening across the neighbouring suburb in his steel carvings. Later, at midnight when the painting came to a culmination, he started playing his piano, which was until then a sign of alarm sent by the artist in case he needed someone’s help. The sound waves from the piano crossed all over the village and it’s inhabitants like forest fire rushed towards the artist willing to offer their helping hands. But to their surprise, what they witnessed was an etched piece of painting which still had the calibre to make the aborigines run towards the catastrophic nearby land. This was the first advertisement ever made but unfortunately couldn’t make any trace in the pamphlets of History, as History always praise only the won and recognized.

Note: I know you are searching to see the man from Cairo, but unfortunately even Google couldn't flash a click of him. So, how can I :) :)

England, 1472

Meet Mr William Caxton, an English merchant who set his heart on introducing the printing press to English people. Four years before he did so, in 1472 this regular churchgoer was called for help by his parish priest.

Priest: May the Holly Lord bless you, Mr William. Hallelloyaa…..

Perplexed

William: Cool…. I will take that

Priest: Lord wants you to help the church before he showers his blessings over you

William: Is he a Businessman these days

Baffled

Priest: Why?

William: I think he is more inclined towards mutual benefit. What’s his demand by the way?

Priest: We the pastors of this parish have made a prayer book.

William: We the parishioners know the prayers byheart

Priest: Not everyone, we want people to buy our book

William: People will buy if it’s good. Don’t worry.

Priest: That’s not gonna work. We want every folk in this parish to buy this.

William: Is it that great?

Priest: Nope I don’t think so but still this is our demand. You own a print machine and probably you can help. Let people know about this through your prints.

William: Let me see. But print’s are damn costly.

Priest: You will get Lord’s blessings and a bottle of Scotch from me for next Christmas

William: Good, that’s a fair enough deal

The prints designed from William was widely distributed to the residents of the parish and they came in large numbers to buy the prayer book. By the way, William got the scotch bottle too.

1631, France

17th Century was a milestone for the rulers of French but not for its citizens. The army opened its wings of trade in India and Madagascar, founded Quebec and penetrated to the North American Great Lakes and Mississippi. But most of its residentiaries were breadless and apart from those serving the army starved to death. This critical employment crisis disturbed the sleep of a newspaper agent. He started collecting job information and allocated a section named Job Classifieds for the needy. Remember the newspaper name “La Gazetta”.

1776, American Revolution

Great Britain is trying to become a superpower. We the Americans want emancipation from their hands. Can you help us, Dear French?

Dear French, Haha… probably the first time we became dear for you

There is a proverb out there which states “the enemy of your enemy is ideally your good friend”

Haven’t heard that in France. May be in America. We will join hands but with certain demands.

Your demands are approved even before listening

Then strengthen your fighting troops. You lack the numbers. Invite commoners to sacrifice their life for the country.

Done, well noted.

Political ads flew all over America. Word of mouth from the army authorities offering a job that paves the way as an entrance for a lucrative career and personal life was actually a bait and dragged many into the pitfalls of death. American army gave clever and crooked advertising, history had ever witnessed.

1835, America

Philadelphia already has a small advertising agency but was grappling to improve its reach. Enlightening their good fortune came automobiles, specifically cars. Now people started moving out, travelling. A plan was proposed by the agency executive that there are chances to get public attention to promote products especially at traffic signals where the locomotives came to a halt. This marked the beginning of Billboard ad’s which then conquered the American roads. The progression of which was phenomenal which made people think about whether they are travelling through a road or an ad’s sphere.

The large format American poster (measuring more than 50 square feet) originated in New York when Jared Bell began printing circus posters in 1835.

1882, America

Bye-bye billboards, I am your successor and the world will call me Electronic advertisements. The first of which was seen in New York, Times Square.

“Plain letters, three to six feet tall, spelt a multicoloured text that filled most of the hotel’s wall. Electric flashers, newly invented, blinked six different lines in sequence.”

The electric ad was a runaway hit, with residents amazed by its “talking” format.

1890, London

Till now people were doing advertising for products or for a purpose. But unfortunately, no one advertised themselves claiming we were behind this. This was the breakthrough for Thomas Barret. He was the chairman of a soap manufacturing firm named “Pears” and he came up with the catchphrase “Good Morning, Have you used Pears soap”? Barret was the first to employ a slogan or one-liner into advertising. His soap’s in its initial days labelled his name on sides of its wrapper, hence people using it came to know about Thomas Barret. He was awarded posthumous Guinness Record as the worlds first brand manager in 2014. This proficient is recognized as the father of modern advertising.

1905, India

Indian advertising initially appeared in print format in Hickeys Bengal Gazette, which was India's first newspaper. Full blown advertising came into being with the ballooning of ad agencies.

Great Britain and its tyranny were slowly reaching its epilogue phase. The roots for Swadeshi movement aimed to boost the number of indigenous industries slowly unfolded. At this time in 1905 Duttaram & Co established an ad agency in Girgaum, Bombay. India’s maiden advertising ventures soon began.

1922

Summer 1922, America’s airwaves changed forever. Until then Radio was a technological miracle, people viewed it in jaw drops, wonders will never cease said they. But nobody knew how to make radios pay. Let’s think in that angle said American Telecom and Telegraph Company (AT & T)

Dear Americans, we at AT & T are planning to sell our precious airtime to public. Does anyone out there want to make use of this opportunity?

Glad to meet you AT & T. We are from Queensboro Corporation. We want to make people know that we have ready to move apartment complex at Jackson Heights near the Subway 7 line.

Ohh!!!! So you wanna advertise your property

Advertise???? What’s that

Exactly what we are gonna do. Wait and see

1941

The first official TV commercial came to limelight. Broadcasted in the US on July 1, 1941, for Bulova watches, the ad got a 10-second spot before a baseball game between Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies with a voice over “?merica runs on Bulova time”

https://youtu.be/Ss6v5bpxODo

 Indianising Advertisements – Influencers popping up

Leela Chitnis became the first Indian to model for Lux. Till now Lux signed influencer and model agreements only with foreign gorgeous popsies. This paved a way to reduce overseas dependency for model and an era of modelling began in India thereby blooming advertising.

1954 -1962 India

TV ad revenues surpassed radio and magazine ad sales in 1954. Few years after independence, the premium elite class of Indians slowly started saying "Hamne Ekk Dabba gharid Liya jinke andhar aadmi chaltha heyy"

India’s first television soap opera “Teesara Rastha” enthralled viewers in 1962.

Mighty Eighties

The biggest milestone in television was the Asiad ’82 when the television turned to colour transmission.

Bombay Dyeing invested money to become the first colour tv ad in India. The visual effect pulled affluent Indians to buy suitings and saw a tremendous increase in sales for BD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88aQ9wm57qE

Apple made the most expensive commercial in the history of television advertising. Directed by Ridley Scott, its recording cost amounted to 900 thousand dollars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player+embedded&v=G9S8JS1qyRM

Smaller But Powerful Box

1989, Tim Berner's Lee invented the World Wide Web (WWW) while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. The first website, info.cern.ch, is developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and published online on August 6, 1991.

Tim Berners Lee introduces WWW (World Wide Web) to the public on August 6, 1991, and becomes publicly available on August 23, 1991. The WWW is what most people today consider the "Internet" or a series of sites and pages that are connected with links. The Internet had hundreds of people who helped develop the standards and technologies used today, but without the WWW, the Internet would not be as popular as it is today.

1994

The resplendent entry of Banner Ad's was the milestone event this year. In 1994, there were only about 30 million people on the web. Most of them accessed the Internet via services like Prodigy and CompuServe. Those ISPs ran their own ads, but since the networks were private they are not considered true banner ads. Instead, the Oct. 27, 1994 issue of HotWired, the web version of Wired was poised to be the first to run true banner ads.

Joe McCambley ran the first banner ad ever online on HotWired.com, and it promoted 7 art museums, sponsored by AT&T.

1995

Advertising pricing was fixed by advertisers for internet activities. A standard CPM (Cost per Mille) came into being where advertisers charge for a thousand views or impressions.

1996

Doubleclick was launched. This gave online industry a completely different perspective in tracking banner ad's and estimating the ROI. DoubleClick targets along various criteria. Targeting can be accomplished using IP addresses, business rules set by the client or by reference to information about users stored using cookies on their machines

First Ad network with 30 websites was formed by Doubleclick Inc. Doubleclick was acquired by Google in 2007. Doubleclick also launched DART(Dynamic Advertising and Reporting Targeting) which helped advertisers to track the clicks and optimize their ad's before the campaign ends.

Google and the new Millenium

Google was founded in 1998. Search engines like AltaVista, Lycos and Infoseek expanded their services whereas Yahoo moved from being just a directory of websites to a search engine.

In 1999, GoTo.com introduced the first pay-for-placement search engine service. Advertisers were given the opportunity to bid for top search engine results on particular keywords. Despite some initial hiccups, GoTo.com was able to monetize their search engine through the model.

Pay-for-placement eventually evolved into pay-per-click. Companies bid on search result placement on a per-click basis.

Google launches AdWords which today accounts for 95% of total company revenues. AdWords aimed to provide a search experience that generated revenue without compromising the quality and relevancy of search results.

While previous paid search models like GoTo.com relied on bids from advertisers to determine search rankings, AdWords introduced a Quality Score model, which took into account an ad's clickthrough rate when determining its placement on the search results page.

Later Facebook was launched in 2004. Video advertising and viral marketing hit the advertising tactics from early 2005 with the onset of Youtube. Facebook launched advertising in 2006, the same year Twitter came into existence. By 2008, Facebook came up with Facebook ad's for business and also an ad platform termed Facebook Beacon which sent data from external websites to Facebook, for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements and allowing users to share their activities with their friends.

Targeting consumers with relevant ads -- rather than bombarding them with a large volume of ad content -- has become a standard practice for online advertisers, particularly on social media. Beyond Facebook's targeting efforts, other social networks also focus on providing an advertising experience for users that don't feel aggressive or impersonal.

Then came Instagram, an American photo and video-sharing social platform owned by Facebook. Instagram ad helps to grow brand exposure, website traffic and generate new leads. Influencer marketing and Instagram together serves a kickass combo to enrich your business and get quality conversions.

By 2010, a new group of media companies emerged. Now advertisers could connect with their audiences through sponsored content and native advertising. Advertisers pay to produce articles, videos, and other types of content for news and media sites. The nature of the content itself is promotional, but the format looks less like an ad and more like a regular piece of content on the host's website.  

Instead of relying on ads that disrupt their target audience's online experience, native advertising allows marketers to create promotional content that supplements a user's online experience.

2014 witnessed the arrival of programmatic buying. Programmatic advertising is a way to automatically buy and optimise digital campaigns, rather than buying directly from publishers. It’s designed to replace human negotiations with machine learning and AI-optimisation. The goal is to increase efficiency and transparency to both the advertiser and the publisher. This is done through real-time auctions where ads are bought at the same as a visitor loads a website.

By 2016, mobile advertising revenues overtook desktop mode. Advertisers became cautious on their landing page aesthetics (UI/UX), page speed and mobile friendliness. Google kept on updating its algorithms to ensure smooth advertising experiences and the eternal advertising continue its journey leaving everyone wandering behind it clueless on what it has in store for the years to follow. Will, there be any search engine add up's. How long does social media dominate the advertising sector, what all new advertising platforms await the next decade with the developments in programming, AI and machine learning. Are we on the peak points of digitization or just the initial or midway range. These questions may find solutions in the days to follow and let's hope that this versatile field may evolve out battling the new technologies and inventions as it did before and survive till the earth revolves around the sun.

"Firing the desire, sprouting the desire and monetizing the desire of your targets is what I call advertising"