page_title: American business history
section_title: Advertising
hierarchical_section_title: American business history / Marketing / Advertising
caption_attribution_description: English: An adverstisement for the J. Walter Thompson Company from 1903
context_page_description: American business history is a history of business, entrepreneurship, and corporations, together with responses by consumers, critics, and government, in the United States from colonial times to the present. In broader context, it is a major part of the Economic history of the United States, but focuses on specific business enterprises.
context_section_description: By 1900 the advertising agency had become the focal point of creative planning, and advertising was firmly established as a profession.  At first, agencies were brokers for advertisement space in newspapers.  N. W. Ayer & Son was the first full-service agency to assume responsibility for advertising content. N.W. Ayer opened in 1869, and was located in Philadelphia. In 1893, 104 companies spent over $50,000 each on national advertising. Most sold patent medicines, which faded away after the federal food and drug legislation of the early 20th century. Seven innovators had emerged in the big time: Quaker Oats, Armour meat, Cudahy meat, American Tobacco Company, P. Lorillard tobacco, Remington Typewriters, and Procter & Gamble soap.  By 1914, two thirds of the top advertisers came from just five industries: 14 food producers, 13 in automobiles and tires,  nine in soap and cosmetics, and four in tobacco.  Agencies were forever breaking up and reforming, especially when one executive would split taking with him a major client and his team of copywriters.
  Advertising increased dramatically in the United States after 1900 as industrialization expanded the supply of manufactured products to a very large market. In order to profit from this higher rate of production, industry needed to recruit workers as consumers of factory products. It did so through the invention of mass marketing designed to influence the population's economic behavior on a larger scale. Total advertising volume in the United States grew from about $200 million in 1880 to nearly $3 billion in 1920.
caption: J. Walter Thompson Co. promotes high-powered advertisement, 1903
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