Frequently, when the word ‘ad’ or ‘advertisement’ arises in a discussion, traditional advertising is the usual assumption of the definition. This includes previous forms of advertising, essentially, print, radio, television and outdoor media that have long been successful to gain exposure (Rae, 2012). Nevertheless, forms of advertising precedently used to be the “red-and-white striped pole that indicated a barber’s shop, the three balls outside a pawnbroker’s shop, and a sign such as “The King’s Head” marking an inn” (Petley, 2004). An important name that looms out of the murk of early advertising history, notably that of 17th-century, is a French doctor, journalist and unlikely adman Theophraste Renaudot (Tungate, 2007). He studied medicine in Paris and Montpellier but was also a writer, thinker, as well as a physician. He intensely contemplated on the Parisian poor and his reflections led him to building a recruitment office and notice boards for the jobless. “This establishment soon became a veritable information, clearinghouse for those seeking and offering work, buying and selling goods, and making public announcements of all kinds”.

 

Advertising took a leap forward with the appearance of printing press and movable type. However, at the beginning of the 19th century, the main printed media (newspapers and magazines) became a minor role in the advertising world, in comparison to “posters, handbills, trades people's “Cards” listing their wares, “advertising engines” (horse-drawn wooden towers covered in posters), and the “sandwich men” who walked the streets with poster boards strapped to their bodies” (Petley, 2010). However, by the middle of the century, newspapers and magazines were fast becoming the main of advertisers, as would commercial television and radio in the 20th century. Primitively, advertisers who desired to promote their goods and services, must design their own advertisements, submit and pay to the relevant media for publication. If not, they will pay active and working individuals in the field, to design advertisements for them. “[I]t wasn’t long before the design, creation and placing of advertisements for those wishing to promote their goods or services, came to be seen as valuable financial opportunity in itself” (Petley, 2010). Ultimately, traditional advertising can be expensive, but can be highly effective with the right planning.

 

The whole idea of cognominating the term as ‘traditional advertising’ is to set them apart from new and the mass of modern-day advertising options, including viral (i.e. Electronic Word-of-Mouth) and online marketing initiatives. It is desirable, therefore, to put any new media development into proper historical perspective by comparing and contrasting the “new” one with the “old” ones. It is tempting to accept the proposition that because they are “old”, the old media have been developed by some point in time and do not change thereafter. Traditional forms of advertising, according to Faber & Stafford (2005) may be going the way of the rotary phone. According to The Washington University in St. Louis (2011), “[e]merging concepts such as crowdsourcing, viral internet campaigns, product placements and guerilla promotions will dominate the marketing and advertising landscape in 2012 and beyond”. The development of new types of media such as the internet and the World Wide Web is a process often surrounded and enveloped by exciting events that go far beyond the medium itself. Radio is an outstanding example of this phenomenon, while building this new medium would have provided enough excitement in and of itself, the accompanying social and economic times ensured it would be a time to remember throughout history. Radio is but one example “of the great spike that new media types inject into the world[.] It is composite of historical events, not just the advent of the new medium and its technical wonderments, that makes “new media” such an important and noteworthy point of immense interest. While today this interest is almost exclusively centered on the Internet” (Faber & Stafford, 2005).

 

Spurgeon (2008) explored conversational interactivity and social participation in the new mass media of conversation and advertising. According to Burnett and Marshall (cited in Faber & Stafford, 2005) “interactivity has been a key category of comparison between ‘old’ mass media and ‘new digitally networked media” and how “interactivity [is also] understood as a property of technical systems of communication”. McMillan (2001) provides an excellent overview of the new and old media. She notes that “many observers tend to write about ‘new media’ such as networked computing and telecommunications as if they had been recently discovered in their fully developed state”. The first thing to note about ‘new’ media is that they are not completely new. They have, in many instances, been growing out of the old media over time, so that there is a need for historical perspective in the discussion of new media. Marvin (1998) wrote: “New technology is a historically relative term. We are not the first generation to wonder at the rapid and extraordinary shifts in the dimensions of the world and the human relationships it contains as a result of new forms of communication”.