Mark Tungate: Advertising History from Ancient Pompeii to Today

Today, my guest is journalist and author Mark Tungate. Mark has spent over 30 years covering the advertising, branding, and luxury industries.

Mark’s book Adland: A Global History of Advertising tells the story of the most influential people and iconic advertising campaigns from around the world. Mark is also the editorial director of the Epica Awards, a global creative competition judged by journalists.

Listen to the Podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube Podcasts

In this episode, we cover the ancient origins of advertising, the emergence of ad agencies, the creative revolution of the 1950s and 60s, and much more.

You can find more of Mark’s writing on LinkedIn and his photography on Instagram.

Now here it is: my conversation with Mark Tungate.

The Origins of "Adland": Approaching the Global History of Advertising

Andrew: Adland is an incredibly ambitious book. It covers the history of advertising, but it's not a picture book or an encyclopedia. It weaves several narratives of the people and the campaigns that define the industry, and it covers every continent, save for Antarctica. So what inspired you to take this on?

Mark: Simply because nobody else had done it, I think. I'd been writing about advertising for years at that point, and I was interested in advertising history because you want to know the background of the subject you're writing about. But it seemed to me that all the books on the subject were in silos, almost, or other country silos. It was like the history of British advertising, the history of US advertising, and then there were a whole bunch of places that nobody had ever really written about. So I thought, maybe I can take this thing on. Maybe it's me that should do this, rather arrogantly perhaps. But I thought, okay, let's give it a try. Let's see if we can do it.

Researching and Interviewing Industry Legends

Andrew: In our emails prior to this, you mentioned that you had a blast writing the book, and it certainly comes through on the page. It's a very, very fun read. So what was your approach to researching it, and what made it so fun?

Mark: Researching it was basic journalism in a way: existing sources, texts, articles, doing the background research, and then getting out there and interviewing people. Many of the people who'd made the interesting parts of advertising, or the most iconic parts of advertising, were still around. So I got to speak to them, which was absolutely amazing and probably the most fun part of writing the book. John Hegarty from BBH, George Lois—an absolute legend, really funny guy—Phil Dusenberry, the late, great Phil Dusenberry from BBDO. These people were living legends and really good fun to talk to.

Andrew: There are so many tremendous characters in this book. Did you ever find that advertisers, sort of being salespeople themselves, that they maybe talk up their own history or embellish? And as a journalist, did you have to validate things, or what was that process?

Mark: I guess that happened a lot. But what made it easy for me is that these people are storytellers. So you just sit there, and you turn on your tape recorder or your recording device, and they do the job for you. So that's great. Obviously, like with any interview you do, people exaggerate or they maybe misremember things. So you have to take everything with a dose of salt, and being skeptical is part of the job of being a journalist, I think. But by and large, I took them at their word.

Andrew: One of the lines in the introduction of your book resonated with me. It's from—you're quoting Colin Jones's book, Paris: A Biography of a City—and the quote goes, "No history of anything will ever include more than it leaves out." So it's impossible to include every ad from every campaign, from every product, from every company. So how did you approach what to include versus what was on the cutting room floor?

Mark: It's a good point. It sorted itself out in a way. I had a list of people, absolutely, and campaigns and characters, if you like, that I absolutely had to include—figures like Bernbach and Ogilvy and Mary Wells, or people I admired and wanted to interview. Others came up along the way. Like, I'd meet somebody who'd say, "Oh, you have to interview this guy, he's amazing," or, "You have to interview this person." That happened a lot.

But I didn't want it to be too much like an encyclopedia. I didn't want it to be like a series of Wikipedia entries. And it was in danger of getting that way at one point. So I wanted to tell the story of advertising. I wanted people to be able to read it as a story. I've always said I don't actually read many books about marketing, and I always want to write books about marketing that people could read on the beach.

So it became almost like a casting process where I would say to myself, okay, who's going to move the story forward, and who are the most interesting and fascinating people who are going to be great fun to read about? And that was how I made those decisions.

The First Signs of Advertising: Brothels in Pompeii, Posters, and Early Newspapers

Andrew: We only have so much time together, and this book captures centuries of history and multiple continents, so we'll only get to capture a small fraction of it. But I thought we could just start at the beginning. What were some of the earliest records of advertising you came across while researching the book?

Mark: It's quite controversial that. Some people say cave paintings were a form of advertising, which, okay. It's said that there are forms of advertising in Pompeii. Somebody told me that there was, apparently among the ruins of Pompeii, there was an ad for a brothel, which I joked about, the two oldest professions working together, which is a nice anecdote. I guess you have to take it slightly with a dose of salt—but advertising has been around forever. Ever since people have been selling stuff, there's been advertising. The word "poster," for example, comes from the word "post," so you're talking about posts driven into the ground with people sticking information to them. So that's been around forever. So, I think almost as long as there have been sort of speaking, intelligent human beings, there's probably been a form of advertising.

Andrew: I would say it gets a little bit to, what is the definition of it, somewhat. Because a sign outside of a shop that says "Goat for Sale" is sort of an advertisement, but it's not really the way that we think of it today. One of the early milestones happened in Paris, France. Can you tell the story of the first French newspaper and how it led to the first personal ads?

Mark: This was a guy with a name that's quite difficult to pronounce called Théophraste Renaudot. And he was a physician to Louis XIII, and he was also a philanthropist as well. So he wanted to help the poor, and he set up this—I guess the best way to describe it is a kiosk where people who had jobs could come and place advertisements, basically job ads, and say, "I need someone to chop wood or milk the cow or whatever." And unemployed people could come and look at these ads and basically get in touch with the people and apply for the jobs.

Théophraste decided that this wasn't enough. He wanted to circulate his job ads more widely, so he created this pamphlet, which became the first newspaper in France, although it only had job ads, it didn't have editorials at the time. But it was essentially what we think of today as being a newspaper. It was a folded sheet with information, and that information was jobs, people looking for hired help.

Andrew: It's amazing. One of the things about advertising today is it sort of subsidizes all of our free media, television and radio, and we get content in exchange for ads. And it strikes me, this is intertwined right from the beginning. I think this was 1631, so the first newspapers, intertwined—it's just remarkable that it happened.

Mark: As a journalist, that's why I've always quite enjoyed writing about advertising. And as a journalist, I felt that it was almost incumbent upon me to do that because, ads, if you're a journalist, ads basically pay your wages. There's no re