In advertising more than in almost any other field, there is constant pressure to keep up with the times. It really is a matter of life and death if you work in marketing and advertising. Marketing advertising campaigns need to come up with constant new ways to appeal to a changing market, and this requires advertising executives to be more in touch with current popular culture than even the hippest teenager.
In many ways, this is a good thing, but it does have a bad side as well. Many advertisers, although well-read in current events, tend to be almost completely unaware of the history of advertising. They are generally required to take a class or two on the history of product advertising in school, but this is about as far as it goes. Some of them know a bit about the history of art or literature, being humanities people, but almost none of them have any knowledge about the origins of their own field.
This is a shame, if you ask me. Not only is the history of advertising interesting, but it is also useful. Advertisers tend to be very pragmatic people, and so they do not study the history of advertising, assuming it to be dry and academic. Nothing could be further from the truth, in point of fact.
You see, advertising is designed to be tuned in to popular culture. As such, it is subject to all of the constantly shifting whims and trends that pop culture experiences. Studying the history of advertising is so important because valuable advertising strategies tend to fade away almost as quickly as they are invented. Studying the history of print advertising, for example, can put you in touch with the past masters of marketing. They had to work wholly in print, and as such their word play and use of language was often much more sophisticated than that used by modern advertising executives.
By studying history of advertising, you can borrow from the strategies of the past as a way of creating the advertising campaigns of the future. That is why continuing education on the history of advertising is mandatory in our marketing firm. A lot of our competitors find our obsession with the history of advertising to be somewhat quaint, but they do not question the success that we have had in recent years. We are one of the fastest growing firms in the industry, and it is because we pay equal attention to the past and the future!
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