A century of modern advertising: from fin de siècle to nervous nineties

William Phillips

A brief history of the advertising business during this century, charting how it rose from cottage industry to world-wide big business.

A century of modern advertising: from fin de sicle to nervous nineties

William Phillips

In less than a hundred years, British advertising has run the gamut from the exuberant charlatanism of a cottage industry to the jitters of a world-beating big business which outgrew its financial strength. Admen contemplate an immediate future of limits to growth: a cruel comedown from the splendours of Thatcher's long boom. How do they see their function in these reduced circumstances; for that matter, what have their forebears and observers thought about the trade since it irrupted into the Victorian fin de sicle to...

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