80 Vintage Ads That Show How Marketing Has Evolved (And What We Can Learn)

A successful advertising campaign is one that catches customers’ attention and includes a memorable slogan or image. But considering the fact that most people consciously see around 100 advertisements every single day, we definitely can’t remember them all. So it’s particularly impressive when a marketing campaign is still going viral decades after it was first published.

We took a trip to Vintage Ads Collections on Instagram and compiled a list of their most fascinating posts below. Some of these images might still be a hit today, while others might get someone fired if they were proposed in a meeting nowadays. But they’re certainly entertaining and wonderful little time capsules!

We might be exposed to more ads and commercials today than ever before in human history, but the idea of advertising itself is certainly not a new concept. According to Instapage, the first signs of advertisements actually appeared in ancient Egyptian steel carvings from 2000 BC. Meanwhile, the first printed ad was published in 1472, when William Caxton decided to advertise a book by posting flyers on church doors in England.

Over 200 years later, the first newspaper ad in the United States was published in 1704. And by 1835, Americans were advertising on big billboards all across the country, with some of the first ads encouraging viewers to see the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey circus. Advertising through the mail, however, didn’t become popular until Sears started sending out postcards in 1892.

Advertising completely changed in the 20th Century when companies had the opportunity to reach their customers directly through the radio. In 1922, the cost of a 10-minute advertising slot on the radio cost $50, or what would be about $965 today. Then, in 1935, George Gallup started utilizing market research, which allowed companies to find out information about their consumers and determine the best ways to advertise to them.

Advertising was also forever changed after companies were given the opportunity to start marketing via television. This began in 1941, and it became the main method of reaching customers for the next 70 years.

Of course, advertising through magazines was also extremely popular during the 20th Century, as most, if not all, of the ads in this article were featured in print. Many of these ads, especially the older ones, look quite foreign to us today because they have so many words. Nowadays, most of our attention spans have been ruined by social media and short-form content, so the idea of reading multiple paragraphs of an advertisement sounds like a huge waste of time. We can barely suffer through 15 seconds of ads on YouTube! But back in the day, when this was one of the only ways to reach customers, it worked brilliantly.

By the mid 1990s, companies finally had the opportunity to reach consumers through their computers. And according to Okoone, even that has transformed drastically over the past few decades. It started out with simple banner ads, which soon turned into search engine advertising. And by 2005, digital advertising was a multi-billion dollar industry. Google was the first to utilize this kind of marketing to its full potential, but Yahoo and Microsoft were successful as well.

Once social media exploded in popularity, it absolutely changed the advertising game. The advantages that these platforms had, Okoone explains, is large amounts of user-generated data. This made it much easier to target consumers with ads for products and services that they would genuinely be interested in. And now, as we all know, if you start talking about a specific product or issue, Instagram will suspiciously start showing you ads for exactly what you were discussing.

Just like any other industry, though, advertising is constantly changing. So Forbes notes that companies need to learn how to adapt if they want to keep up. Figuring out how to utilize popular platforms is a necessity. Nowadays, many companies need to create a TikTok account or use influencer marketing to get the word out about their products. It’s not easy to grab consumers’ attention anymore, so businesses can’t rely on the same strategies that yielded success five or ten years ago.

It’s also crucial for companies to optimize efficiency if they want to remain competitive. “In December 2020, we teamed up with a well-known brand to produce a TV commercial through creator content filmed entirely remotely,” Corbett Drummey wrote for Forbes. “The brand quickly received 118 video assets from creators, reduced its production time by 50% and cut 30% of its traditional production cost. The success of this unique piece of content resulted from testing a new agile approach.”

Are you enjoying this list full of blasts from the past? Keep upvoting the ads that definitely would have caught your eye if you saw them in a magazine, and let us know in the comments below if you remember any other famous marketing campaigns from your youth.