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100 years of advertising

Steel & Feather
Mar 15, 2017
3 min read

The road is narrow but by walking through the small door, and entering The Old Truman Brewery, we are entering a different world: a condensation of 100 years of advertising. You can nearly smell it when you go into a blue light corridor with different signs hanging from the ceiling: “How would you know where to find help or advice?” was written on one of the signs of the place that represented a shop without branding.

IPA is celebrating 100 years of British Advertising and for this, they made a four-day exhibition at The Old Truman Brewery in London. Over these 100 years, advertising has moved to a dynamic and interactive approach with the future of VR/AR. This exhibition takes us not only on a journey through advertising, but also way back in world history. The first cinema advertising using moving images was shown (for Dewar’s Whisky) in 1900. Ten years after, in 1910, the first electric advertisement operated on Piccadilly Circus, becoming one of the most iconic spots in the world where around 72 million people pass by every year. Piccadilly Circus is often compared with Time Square. In 2014, for the second time in 20 years, it became possible for other brands to buy a spot at Piccadilly Circus, after the contract with Japanese TDK ran out. The spot sizes are 21.1 by 4.8 meters and could be afforded for roughly 4 million pounds per year according Quartz.

This just gives a short insight of how big the Advertising industry in the UK today is. According to the IPA, there are more than 10.000 agencies with more than 167,000 employees, and brings in more than 20.1 billion pounds yearly to the UK.

The exhibition is a short journey through the history of Advertising. It shows how advertising has evolved during the first World War and the second World War. Furthermore it shows how Labour started using advertising and how they have done this over the years. At a fridge is the famous to the phrase “Beanz Meanz Heinz” located, to give a short indication of how advertising has influenced culture over the years.

By going through the exhibition it can be argued that Advertising has worked on changing society especially since 1945 and till today.

In today's advertising VR/AR and the monitoring of Big Data have innovated the way of thinking advertising and marketing. Google as one of the big placers in the online advertising and monitoring Big Data is taking up a big part of this exhibition from where it is even possible to live monitor the most searched words in the Google Browser. The technology has always had an impact on how Advertising evolves. This impact is visible here from the last 100 years to where it will have an impact in the future. Sean MacDonald and Suzanne Powers from McCann Worldgroup argue that: “The dialogue needs to shift decidedly closer to human-first and away from tech-first. We are all (at least as far as we know) humans first”. Before the 90s we only needed to understand the relationship between two things; the brand and the human. Today this has changed, we now need to find the relation between; Human, Brand and Technology.

The journey through 100 years of advertising is showing how engagement or most importantly a personal/emotional relation to a brand is important. It is where the technology becomes a tool to tell engaging human brand stories, which the audience can connect with. When I am walking through the door, out to the street it is clear that not only has Advertising been evolved it has also told and created cultures which it will continue doing.