How the Wild West Built Modern Advertising

The covered wagon era that unleashed American advertising

A century and a half ago, American business struck advertising gold. The California Gold Rush expanded westward settlement just as surging industrialization, railroads, and newspapers forged a nascent national market. New print outlets enabled coast-to-coast branding.

Key Takeaways

  • New 19th century railroads, newspapers and magazines enabled nationwide branding at scale for the first time.
  • Exuberant pioneers like P.T. Barnum captured attention through stunts and repetition, establishing advertising as a force.
  • The influx of immigrants and the California Gold Rush fueled economic expansion and appetite for products.
  • Primitive ads were text-heavy with minimal art due to narrow newspaper columns, yet innovation emerged.
  • Visionary publisher Bonner boosted readership via splashy, relentless magazine promotions.
  • The advent of ad agencies brought dedicated specialists who advanced strategy and creativity.
  • Early agencies brokered print ad space through slick deals, earning commission from publishers.
  • Over decades, agencies evolved into full-service advertising architects guiding major brands.

By 1850, over 2,000 papers and 500 magazines existed. These publications connected far-flung communities, spreading news, culture, and commercial messages. Advertising spending and experiments blossomed, though often proving primitive by modern standards.

Transportation networks spread periodicals and the ads within. Railroads spanning over 30,000 miles by the 1860s opened new frontiers while accelerating trade. The transcontinental railroad completed in 1869 unified the coasts. Where rails went, mail-order catalogs and national circulation magazines followed.

Publishers harnessed speedy steam presses, enabling 700 percent more newspapers by the 1850s compared to 20 years prior. Most ads of the era still looked boring, limited to a single column of tiny agate text. But a few innovators grabbed attention, foreshadowing modern formats.

One creative maverick, Robert Bonner, boosted his New York Ledger’s circulation to 400,000 partly through splashy magazine ads. When publications confined his ads to four inches tall, Bonner repeatedly printed the exact same mini-notice down a full column until it filled a whole page.

Other contemporary ads fractured sentences into repetitive fragments or played visual tricks stacking text into odd shapes. Though gimmicky by today’s standards, these unconventional pitches earned notice amid columns of gray type.

The national zeitgeist of limitless possibility infused advertising with infectious exuberance. Opulent trade cards and signage blanketed bustling Main Streets. Horse-drawn vehicles ambling amid handbill-toting street urchins turned city roads into mobile bulletin boards. Blazing rooftop logos illuminated dusk skies. Newspapers swelled with ads thanks to relaxed standards about segmentation from editorial content.

The covered wagon era of advertising delivered bold new experiments, for better and worse. And atomic age promotion was just over the rise.

The Rise Of The Ad Agency

The mid-1800s saw advertising take a pivotal turn with the advent of ad agencies. Previously, advertising was an informal sideline for merchants and publishers. Space salesmen might moonlight writing copy. Printers occasionally suggested promotions to clients. A few lone copywriters roamed from one temporary gig to the next. But no full-service advertising firms existed.

With advertising split between various parties’ secondary concerns, most efforts proved generic and haphazard. Only legendary showman P.T. Barnum gave promotion top priority, demonstrating advertising’s latent potential.

Ad agencies changed the game. Specialist organizations finally concentrated wholly on advancing advertising through innovation and strategy. Market research, art direction, copy testing, media planning – foundational practices that still steer campaigns today – largely originated from agency trailblazers.

The earliest ad agents functioned like space brokers rather than strategic consultants. In 1841, Volney Palmer became likely the first independent agent selling ad placements regionally. Rival John Hooper represented newspapers seeking advertisers.

These pioneers simply arranged insertion orders, earning commissions from publishers. They didn’t craft marketing plans or create content. Secretly, agencies bargained down publishers’ ad rates behind the scenes, keeping the difference as profit.

One milestone campaign came when Peaslee & Company coordinated national newspaper promotions supporting Civil War bond sales – considered America’s first nationwide ad effort.

Over decades, agencies evolved from space sellers into full-service advertising architects. Some focused purely on creative concepting before the spread of in-house ad departments. Others monopolized ad inventory from publications before reselling at a markup.

The path was winding, but driven by profit motive and imagination in equal parts. As one writer put it, while short-sighted corporations obsessed over processes and finances, admen kept creativity, the heart of commerce, pumping. Advertising agencies accelerated civilization.

The covered wagon era that opened the West unlocked advertising’s potential just as railroads and newspapers were stitching together modern America. With pioneering gusto, admen tamed a wild, chaotic landscape into an engine powering newly industrialized commerce and culture.

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