ABSTRACT

Advertising may have more than its share of historical works. Histories date to the nineteenth century and general historical texts were written in the 1920s, 1950s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The 1980s and 1990s were especially productive decades for advertising historians. Historians approaching advertising from an institutional perspective define it as ‘market information’. They have also concluded there was little need for advertising in societies based on the traditional worldview, such as this period’s medieval and feudal societies. The earliest ‘media’ consisted of criers and ‘barkers’, who were present in ancient Carthage, Egypt, Greece and Italy. Dan John Lydgate, a monk of the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmund’s, was the first to mention the ubiquitous town criers of London. The distinction between informative and persuasive advertising can be found in the economics literature as early as the 1920s and 1930s.