last highlighted date: 2023-12-04
Highlights
- The first advertising agency in America was set up by Volney Palmer in Philadelphia in 1841. For the next several decades the work of agencies was to broker space for advertisers in newspapers. It was not until the 1870s and 1880s that agencies began to resemble the “full service” operations that became the standard in the 20th century. Full service agencies may provide, for example, consultation on marketing problems, product naming, package design, advertisement design and production, and research, as well as purchasing media space or time to get the advertising message out to the public.
- Tags: advertising
- Note: first advertisement agencies and their mission
- Only a few other American books seem to have been published on the “how to” of advertising until the 1880s. In that decade, several types of publications began to appear: pamphlets or books that promoted the services of individual agencies; instructional books on how to do the work of advertising; and professional journals. Among the journals, one of the earliest and most successful was Printers’ Ink, founded in 1888 by the ubiquitous George P. Rowell. The early promotional books, well exemplified by the “Blue Books” of the J.Walter Thompson Company [several examples are part of this project] sometimes combined information on the importance of advertising with samples of the agency’s work, photos of their offices, and sometimes media information (e.g. newspaper or magazine circulation and rate information). Thompson also started very early to publish promotional books targeted to specific markets; The Red Ear of 1887 [excerpted in this project] listed agricultural papers that would be the appropriate medium for advertisers of farm products.
- Tags: advertising
- Note: promotional book