History of the industry

Advertising is a form of communication used to help sell products and services.
Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages and wall posters;The tradition of wall painting can be traced back to Indian rock art paintings that date back to 4000 BCE. It is the oldest form of advertising.
In the 17th century advertisements started to appear in weekly newspapers in England. In 19th century, we had mail-order advertising.
In the early 1920s, the first radio stations were established by radio equipment manufacturers and retailers who offered programs in order to sell more radios to consumers.Advertising started to carry o ver to television in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the introduction of cable television and particularly MTVMTV ushered in a new type of advertising: the consumer tunes in for the advertising message, rather than it being a by-product or afterthought.Marketing through the Internet opened new frontiers for advertisers and contributed to the "dot-com" boom of the 1990s.A recent advertising innovation is "guerrilla marketing", which involve unusual approaches such as staged encounters in public places, giveaways of products such as cars that are covered with brand messages, and interactive advertising where the viewer can respond to become part of the advertising message. This reflects an increasing trend of interactive and "embedded" ads, such as via product placement, having consumers vote through text messages, and various innovations utilizing social network services such as MySpace. The share of advertising spending relative to GDP has changed little across large changes in media. For example, in the U.S. in 1925, the main advertising media were newspapers, magazines, signs on streetcars, and outdoor posters. Advertising spending as a share of GDP was about 2.9 percent. By 1998, television and radio had become major advertising media. Nonetheless, advertising spending as a share of GDP was slightly lower—about 2.4 percent. At the turn of the 21st century, a number of websites including the search engine Google, started a change in online advertising by emphasizing contextually relevant, unobtrusive ads intended to help, rather than inundate, users. This has led to a plethora of similar efforts and an increasing trend of interactive advertising.

Money spent on advertising has increased dramatically in recent years. In 2007, spending on advertising has been estimated at over $150 billion in the United States and $385 billion worldwide,and the latter to exceed $450 billion by 2010.