Stages of Development of the Advertising from Posters to Audio-visual Images (Historical Analysis of the Social and Commercial Advertisement)

The contemporary world, without advertising, is unimaginable. A demand for it appeared even in the ancient years. Acknowledging the significance of the advertising activity takes us to the earliest times. Many centuries ago, when information was imprinted on stones, clay, wooden and copper plates, the society of that time had acknowledged that they had to apply additional efforts to market their products successfully. It is mainly the way how the first advertising inscriptions appeared; they had been preserved by history as a result of archaeological excavations. It is noteworthy that ancient advertisements served commercial as well as political aims. Social advertising is a prosocial project of the past century. Social direction occupies an important place in the large “family” of the advertising activity. It is aimed, unlike commercial advertisements, at selling social behaviour instead of a product that generally brings favourable results for society. Simultaneously with the institutional development of the media, advertising (commercial, social, and political) was transformed into a multimedia product. It has easily adjusted to digital platforms that, for that time, all preconditions already existed. The present research was targeted at using the method of historical analysis, collecting/analyzing/reviewing ancient forms of advertising and determining the stages of its development from ancient to recent times. Besides, in the context of the concept of technological determinism, its aim was to represent the theoretic grounds of the topic. Advertising, during the long-term history of its development, has passed through significant transformations and reached contemporariness in a modified form. Social advertising, similar to its commercial variant, had been forming into a multi-media product in parallel with the institutional development of media.