A Short History of Advertising – A Wealth of Common Sense

“Modern consumerism is the best-funded social science experiment in the world.” If that line makes you laugh and squirm at the same time, congratsyou’ve already felt advertising working. (Don’t worry. You’re not “weak.” You’re simply a mammal with a wallet.)

Ben Carlson’s point in A Wealth of Common Sense is basically this: advertising isn’t just “annoying noise” between the parts of life we actually want. It’s the business model that quietly paid for newspapers, then radio, then television, and now… most of the internet. Advertising doesn’t just follow cultureit helps build it by buying attention, shaping stories, and getting very good at pressing the emotional buttons we pretend we don’t have.

So let’s take a fun (and surprisingly useful) walk through how advertising evolvedfrom “FREE COW, PLEASE RETURN” notices to algorithmic ads that know you’re hungry before you do.

Advertising, in Plain English: Selling Attention With a Story

Advertising is storytelling with a job to do. Sometimes the job is noble (“Wear a seatbelt”). Sometimes it’s silly (“This potato chip has a new vibe”). But the structure is similar: make a promise, stir an emotion, offer a shortcut, and ask for a response.

That’s why Carlson’s advertising examples often feel like investing examples: both industries live and die by human behavior. People don’t always do what’s “optimal.” They do what feels safe, familiar, exciting, or socially rewarded. Advertising learned this early, tested it relentlessly, and then scaled it across every new medium that showed up.

And yes, you’re “in advertising” too

Even if you’ve never bought an ad, you still pitch yourselfat work, in friendships, on social media, on dating apps, in a PTA group chat where everyone is somehow both polite and terrifying. Personal branding is just advertising with fewer legal disclaimers.

The Pre-Mad Men Era: Ads Before Advertising Was “An Industry”

Advertising existed long before Madison Avenue had sharp suits and sharper one-liners. Early versions were simple: signs, posters, and printed notices announcing products, events, and services. As printing spread, so did the ability to copy the same message again and againone of the biggest “unfair advantages” in human history.

Newspapers: when attention became something you could sell

In early America, newspapers were limitedexpensive, small, and aimed at people who had both leisure time and money. Then came a shift that still echoes today: lowering the price of content to grow the audience, and making up the difference by selling reader attention to advertisers.

The genius move wasn’t “placing ads.” It was bundling attention. Instead of just being a bulletin board, publishers could deliver a crowd. And once you can deliver a crowd, you can charge for access to it.

Key idea: the product wasn’t the newspaper. The product was the reader’s attention.

The 1800s: The Attention Business Gets Serious

By the 1800s, the U.S. was urbanizing fast. More businesses. More goods. More competition. More reasons to shout, “Pick me!” But the real accelerator was distribution: cheaper printing, better logistics, and a rapidly expanding media ecosystem.

Advertising agencies show up

Once advertisers had many publications to choose from, middlemen appeared. The earliest U.S. agencies weren’t “creative shops” yet. They were brokersbuying and reselling space, coordinating placements, and standardizing deals. Think: less “creative genius” and more “media logistics with a ledger.” ^[1]

But over time, agencies evolved into full-service operationsstrategy, copywriting, design, and eventually research. The moment agencies started shaping the message (not just placing it), advertising became what we recognize today.

Early 1900s: Persuasion Meets Mass Production (And Regulation)

Industrialization produced a new problem: companies could make an enormous amount of stuff, but consumers still needed reasons to choose their soap, cereal, tonic, or razor. This is where modern brand-building takes offnames, packaging, slogans, and consistent promises.

When “miracle cures” forced the government’s hand

As advertising scaled, so did deceptionespecially in patent medicines and mislabeled products. Public pressure helped drive landmark consumer protection efforts in the early 1900s, including federal action aimed at misbranding and unsafe products. ^[2]

Later, broader truth-in-advertising enforcement became central to U.S. consumer protection: ads must be truthful, not misleading, and supported by evidence when appropriate. ^[3]

Why this matters: trust is a form of capital. If consumers don’t trust claims, the whole system becomes more expensive (more skepticism, more friction, more regulation).

Radio: The First “Free” Entertainment Paid For by Ads

Radio didn’t just change entertainmentit changed the economics of attention. For the first time, you could reach millions in real time inside their homes, during leisure hours, when defenses were down and the vibe was cozy.

The first radio ad and “toll broadcasting”

In the early 1920s, broadcasters experimented with selling airtime, a practice once described as “toll broadcasting.” A frequently cited milestone is a paid WEAF broadcast promoting a real estate development in Queens in 1922. ^[4]

At first, many people worried radio would become “advertising chatter.” Spoiler: it did. But it also made radio economically scalable, which helped accelerate widespread access.

That trade-offfree (or cheap) content funded by adsbecame the template for the next century.

Television: When Advertising Learned to Sell With Pictures

Radio is persuasive. Television is persuasive and visual. That difference is enormous. You can demonstrate a product, create mini-dramas, use humor, leverage attractiveness, and make the brand feel like a lifestyle instead of a purchase.

The first TV commercial

U.S. commercial television begins in the early 1940s, and a commonly cited “first” television commercial is a Bulova “time” spot broadcast on NBC’s WNBT in New York on July 1, 1941. ^[5]

By the 1950s and early 1960s, TV ownership soared in American households, turning the living room into the world’s most valuable marketing venueone couch at a time. ^[6]

Madison Avenue and the creative revolution

Once TV became dominant, advertising got more cinematicand agencies got famous. The “Mad Men” era didn’t invent persuasion, but it professionalized it with sharper creative standards, bigger budgets, and a cultural footprint that still lingers in how we talk about “brands.”

This is where “brand image” becomes a core asset: not just what a product does, but what it means. ^[7]

The Digital Era: From Mass Messaging to Measurable Behavior

If TV made advertising visual, the internet made it measurable. Suddenly you didn’t have to guess whether an ad “worked.” You could track impressions, clicks, conversions, andeventuallyuser-level behavior across devices. That changed everything, including the incentives.

1994: the first banner ads

One famous early milestone is the first widely recognized banner ad era in 1994, including AT&T’s “You Will” campaign running on early web publicationsproving the web could be monetized through advertising. ^[8]

Search advertising: intent becomes inventory

Search ads were a breakthrough because they paired advertising with intent. You weren’t interrupting someone’s sitcomyou were showing up when they actively asked a question.

Google’s AdWords launch in October 2000 helped standardize self-serve, keyword-based advertising on search results, pushing digital advertising into a new growth phase. ^[9]

Social advertising: targeting meets identity

Social platforms didn’t just sell attention; they sold identity signalsinterests, relationships, communities, life events, and behaviors. Facebook’s ad platform announcement in 2007 is one visible milestone in the shift toward social and behavioral targeting. ^[10]

Ad tech infrastructure grows up (and gets controversial)

As the ecosystem matured, ad serving and exchange infrastructure became central, including major acquisitions that reshaped the market. For example, Google announced an agreement to acquire DoubleClick in 2007, reflecting how important ad-tech plumbing had become. ^[11]

The upside: efficiency and scale. The downside: privacy concerns, opaque middlemen, and incentives to collect “just one more data point” forever.

What Advertising History Teaches Investors (A Wealth of Common Sense Angle)

Carlson’s investing lens makes advertising history more than trivia. It’s a recurring lesson in how business models evolve:

1) The winner is often the company that controls distribution

Newspapers controlled printed distribution. Radio controlled audio distribution. TV controlled visual distribution. Today, platforms control feeds, search results, and recommendation engines. If you control distribution, you can monetize attentiondirectly or indirectly.

2) “Free” is usually paid forjust not by you (directly)

Advertising subsidizes content. That’s not inherently evil. But it does shape incentives: engagement becomes the goal because engagement is what can be sold.

3) Measurement changes behavior

The more measurable ads become, the more optimization takes oversometimes at the expense of brand-building, creativity, and user trust. When everything becomes a KPI, everything becomes a little… weirder.

4) Human nature stays the same

Platforms change. Psychology doesn’t. We still respond to status, fear, belonging, novelty, scarcity, and stories. The tools evolve; the levers stay familiar.

The Future: More Personal, More Regulated, More “Please Accept Cookies”

Advertising is likely to become:

• More personalized (because data + AI makes it possible),
• More constrained (because privacy laws, platform rules, and consumer backlash make it necessary),
• More blended into content (because obvious ads get ignoredhello, “banner blindness”).

In other words: ads will keep following attention. And attention will keep moving. We can complain about it (and we should, sometimes), but historically, advertising doesn’t disappearit adapts.

of “Experience” With Advertising (The Part Where It Gets Uncomfortably Familiar)

If you want a real-world feel for advertising’s evolution, don’t start with a museum. Start with your own day.

You wake up and check your phone. Before you’ve even fully returned to the land of the conscious, you’re already in a marketplace. Your lock screen might feature a headline designed to win a click. Your feed is a curated mix of friends, creators, and brandsbecause the modern ad is often disguised as “a vibe,” “a story,” or “a helpful tip.” You tell yourself you’re just watching a quick video, but the video is a sales funnel wearing comedy makeup.

Later, you search for “best office chair” because your back has started filing formal complaints. Suddenly, the internet develops a chair-based personality. You notice chair ads everywhere: news sites, social apps, YouTube pre-roll, even that random recipe blog that somehow has twelve pop-ups and a life coach. That’s not magic. That’s the measurable, retargetable internet doing exactly what it was built to do.

And then there’s the nostalgia playCarlson talks about how powerful emotional storytelling can be. If you’ve ever teared up at a commercial that wasn’t supposed to make you cry (a dog reunion! a soldier homecoming! a slow-motion burger shot with dramatic lighting!), you’ve experienced the same principle agencies used in the TV era: make the brand a feeling, not a product. The “carousel” effect isn’t limited to Kodak slides. Any brand that links itself to family, identity, or “the good old days” is basically renting your memories like a short-term Airbnb.

Advertising also shows up in how we present ourselves. A LinkedIn profile is an ad. A resume is a direct-response landing page. Even a text message can be “brand voice” if you’re trying to sound confident, funny, competent, or unbothered (while being extremely bothered). That’s the sneaky truth: advertising isn’t just what companies do to usit’s what humans do to each other whenever attention is scarce and outcomes matter.

The most practical “experience-based” lesson? Treat attention like money. Spend it on purpose. Unfollow aggressively. Use ad blockers if you want. But also recognize the trade-off: if you’re not paying for a product, the product might be your time, your data, or your future purchasing decisions. Advertising is not just historyit’s the operating system of modern media. Once you see that, you don’t just consume content. You negotiate with it.

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