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Technology in Advertising Essay example

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Technology in Advertising

Over 10 years ago, Stan Rapp and Tom Collins, international marketing consultants, stated that the average American is "bombarded by five-thousand advertising messages per day…" (Caution, pp. 6). This number has more than likely tripled due to our technology enhanced society. In the beginning there were criers or hawkers; nowadays there are pop-ads and email spam. Technology has had a key impact on advertising. This paper will illustrate how "major" advertising first started and how it has progressed to where it is now.

Major advertising is advertising with the ability to reach great numbers of people. The printing press is the foundation for what is now known as major advertising. The first printing press …show more content…

With a single issue costing six cents (or ten dollars for a year’s subscription), few people could afford to buy newspapers. Most working people were content to browse through secondhand copies left behind in taverns, barbershops, and other public places" (Accept, pp.25).

Benjamin Day, a publisher in New York, wanted to produce a general-interest newspaper that would appeal to the average American. With new paper-making machines and steam-driven presses driving printing costs down, Day could make the new newspapers affordable—one cent per copy. On September 3, 1833, Day’s newspaper, the New York Sun, hit the streets; the "penny press" was an instant hit. Then, on May 1, 1835, the Sun’s first penny press rival debuted, the New York Herald. The Herald was the first newspaper to feature a "Personals" section, in which anyone could place a noncommercial advertisement for fifty cents.

As papers continued to flourish, so did technology. The history of radio began in 1873 with a publication, by the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell, on his theory of electromagnetic waves. The concept of using electromagnetic waves for the broadcasting of messages from one location to another was not new. The heliograph, for example, successfully transmitted messages via a beam of light rays, which could be transformed by a shutter to carry signals in the form of dots and dashes, Morse code.

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