The Birth of Advertising — Newspapers and the First Agents

Open a smartphone in the morning and we are surrounded by countless advertisements. In the gaps of search results, before and after a video, between the lines of the news. So utterly ordinary that it has become part of the scenery, this thing we call ‘advertising’ has a clearly defined era of beginning. It was the 19th century, when the new medium of the newspaper began to blanket society. The page that announced goods to the world, and the people who wanted to sell them. From the moment a single ‘agent’ stood between these two, advertising became a profession, and in time transformed into a vast industry. The story of the advertising agency began with that small act of mediation.

The Newspaper Became the ‘Vessel’ for Advertising

Advertising itself is as old as humanity. The market crier, the shop-front signboard, the notice pasted on a wall. Yet for it to swell to the scale we might call an industry, a ‘vessel’ was needed to deliver the same information to many people at once. The newspaper, which grew its circulation across many regions in the 19th century, became exactly that vessel. As readers increased, so did the merchants who wished to place their goods in a corner of the page. Newspaper and advertisement entered a relationship in which each fattened the other.

The early days of advertising, however, came with great inconveniences. A merchant who wanted to sell his goods had almost no idea in which newspaper, and at what price, his advertisement should appear. Newspapers existed scattered across the regions, with no uniformity in rates or format. To place an advertisement in a distant town’s paper, one had to negotiate with each publisher one by one. This very burden became the gap that summoned a new profession.

It was the ‘advertising agent,’ standing between newspaper and advertiser, who saw the opportunity here. They secured space in multiple newspapers in advance and earned a commission by brokering it to merchants who wished to advertise. The act of advertising shifted from the individual merchant’s idea to a job carried out by a specialist. Those first practitioners were the ancestors of the later advertising agency.

Volney Palmer and Ayer’s ‘Open Contract’

Widely known as one of the earliest advertising agents in the United States is Volney Palmer. Raised in a family with ties to the newspaper trade, he is said to have begun brokering advertising in Philadelphia around 1841, building an intermediary business that handled space in newspapers across the regions. On behalf of merchants, he arranged which newspaper to use and at what price. Palmer’s work was the very thing the word ‘agency’ points to. His name is often placed at the starting point of advertising as a profession in the United States.

Yet the agent’s position in this era differed greatly from today’s advertising company. They first bought space from newspapers as cheaply as possible and sold it to advertisers as dearly as possible. In other words, they stood not so much on the side of the advertiser as on the side of their own margin. From the advertiser’s view, how the price was set was hard to make out, and the agent was a partner hard to trust.

The firm said to have shown one answer to that question was N. W. Ayer & Son, founded in Philadelphia in 1869. Around 1875, the company is said to have adopted an arrangement called the ‘open contract.’ This was reportedly a contract that, after making the agency’s share clear in advance, promised to work on the advertiser’s behalf for a fixed period. Rather than earning by hiding the purchase price, the agent moved as the advertiser’s representative. This shift is credited as an event that changed the very character of the agency profession. That said, there are differing views on this assessment, and the customs of the time were not overturned overnight. Even so, a current of reexamining ‘whose side the agency stands on’ was certainly born around this time.

From Handbill to Newspaper — Japan’s Journey

Across the sea, Japan too has a long history of advertising. Especially well known is the ‘hikifuda’ handbill, which developed during the Edo period. The word ‘hiku’ (‘to draw’) is said to have long carried the meaning of ‘to distribute,’ and a hikifuda was a printed sheet handed out to promote a business. By one account, in 1683 in the early Edo period, the Mitsui Echigoya kimono shop, which set up in Nihonbashi, handed out a single printed sheet to mark its opening — told as an old example of printed promotion.

By the Bunka and Bunsei eras, as the purchasing power of ordinary people grew, hikifuda were printed for every kind of product, from restaurants to cosmetics, medicine, and sundries. Entering the Meiji era, hikifuda centered on vivid, colorful designs were handed out at the New Year, and they are said to have flourished as mass-printing techniques spread. The sight of merchants contriving every device to capture customers’ hearts tied into culture and fashion, and the hikifuda that survive today serve as records reflecting the life of that age.

Then, from the end of the Edo period into the Meiji era, the new medium of the newspaper sprouted in Japan too. In 1871, the Yokohama Mainichi Shimbun, regarded as Japan’s first daily newspaper in Japanese, was launched, laying the groundwork for an age in which product information appeared in the press. The very word ‘kokoku’ (‘advertisement’) is said to have gradually spread into common use within the newspapers of these early Meiji years. The culture of the hikifuda that Edo nurtured, and the vessel of the newspaper that came in from the West. Where these two met, Japan’s modern advertising quietly rose to its feet.

And so, in the 19th century, through the vessel of the newspaper and the agent who stood between, advertising gave its first cry as a profession. Yet what the advertising of this age sold was still the ‘product’ itself, right before one’s eyes. As the era advanced, people came to fix their hearts not on the product itself but on its name and image — that is, on the ‘brand’ — and to pay for it. The footsteps of a new society, where things were made in great quantity and consumed in great quantity, were approaching just beyond.