1. HISTORY OF ADVERTISING
When studying today's advertising industry, it's useful to understand the
history of advertising. You can look at the GCSE pages for introductory
information and links.
Early Advertising
Although word of mouth, the most basic (and still the most powerful) form of
advertising has been around ever since humans started providing each other
with goods and services, Advertising as a discrete form is generally agreed to
have begun alongside newspapers, in the seventeenth century. Frenchman
ThéophrasteRenaudot (Louis XIII's official physician) created a very early
version of the supermarket noticeboard, a 'bureau des addresses et des
rencontres'. Parisians seeking or offering jobs, or wanting to buy or sell
goods, put notices at the office on Île de la Cité. So that the maximum
number of people had access to this information, Renaudot created La
Gazette in 1631, the first French newspaper. The personal ad was born.
In England, line advertisements in newspapers were very popular in the
second half of the seventeenth century, often announcing the publication of a
new book, or the opening of a new play. The Great Fire of London in 1666
was a boost to this type of advertisement, as people used newspapers in the
aftermath of the fire to advertise lost & found, and changes of address. These
early line ads were predominantly informative, containing descriptive, rather
than persuasive language.

2. Let Them Drink Coffee
Advertisements were of key importance, even at this early point in their
history, when it came to informing consumers about new products. Coffee is
one such example. Coffee was first brewed into a drink in the Middle East, in
the fifteenth century. The Arabs kept the existence of this vivifying concoction
a secret,refusing to export beans(or instructions on how to grind and brew
them). Legend has it that Sufi Baba Budan smuggled seven beans into India
in 1570 and planted them. Coffee then spread to Italy, and throughout
Europe, served at coffeehouses. The rapid spread of coffee as both a drink
and a pattern of behaviour (coffeehouses became social gathering places) is
in no small part due to the advertising of coffee's benefits in newspapers.

3. The ad to the right is the first advertisement in London for coffee, and
appeared in 1657 (source: http://www.web-
books.com/Classics/ON/B0/B701/15MB701.html). In Modern English, it reads:
In Bartholomew Lane on the back side of the Old Exchange, the drink called Coffee (which is a very
wholesome and Physical drink, having many excellent virtues, closes the Orifice of the Stomach,
fortifies the heat within, helps Digestion, quickens the Spirits, makes the heart light, is good against
Eye-sores, Coughs, or Colds, Rheums, Consumptions, Head-ache, Dropsy, Gout, Scurvy, Kings Evil
and many others) is to be sold both in the morning and at three o'clock in the afternoon.
This early example of advertising copy makes coffee sound like a wonder
drug. While the claims in the first half of the sentence may be true (coffee
does indeed stave off hunger pangs and 'quicken the Spirits'), the
presentation of coffee as a cure-all for specific medical conditions like dropsy,
gout and Kings Evil (scrofula - swollen abscesses in the neck) is pure
advertising hyperbole. But it worked – people flocked to coffee houses to try
this new beverage for themselves, and engendered a caffeine habit that
persists in our society today.
Advertising and the Industrial Revolution
When goods were hand made, by local craftsmen, in small quantities, there
was no need for advertising. Buyer and seller were personally known to one
another, and the buyer was likely to have direct experience of the product.
The buyer also had much more contact with the production process,
especially for items like clothing (hand-stitched to fit) and food (assembled
from simple, raw ingredients). Packaging and branding were unknown and
unnecessary before the Industrial Revolution. However, once technological
advances enabled the mass production of soap, china, clothing etc, the close
personal links between buyer and seller were broken. Rather than selling out
of their back yards to local customers, manufacturers sought markets a long
way from their factories, sometimes on the other side of the world.
This created a need for advertising. Manufacturers needed to explain and
recommend their products to customers whom they would never meet
personally. Manufacturers, in chasing far-off markets, were beginning to
compete with each other. Therefore they needed to brand their products, in
order to distinguish them from one another, and create mass
recommendations to support the mass production and consumption model.

4. Newspapers provided the ideal vehicle for this new phenomenon,
advertisements. New technologies were also making newspapers cheaper,
more widely available, and more frequently printed. They had more pages, so
they could carry more, bigger, ads. Simple descriptions, plus prices, of
products served their purpose until the mid nineteenth century, when
technological advances meant that illustrations culd be added to advertising,
and colour was also an option. Advertisers started to add copy under the
simple headings, describing their products using persuasive prose.
Bubbles — the Pears' Soap Advertising Innovation
An early advertising success story is that of Pears Soap. Thomas Barratt
married into the famous soap making family and realised that they needed to
be more aggressive about pushing their products if they were to survive. He
bought the copyright to a painting by noted Pre-Raphaelite artist, Sir John
Everett Millais, originally entitled 'Bubbles'. Barratt added a bar of Pears' Soap
to the bottom left of the image, and emblazoned the company name across
the top, launching the series of ads featuring cherubic children which firmly
welded the brand to the values it still holds today. He took images considered
as "fine art" and used them to connote his brand's quality, purity (ie untainted
by commercialism) and simplicity (cherubic children). The campaign was a
huge success.
History of Bubbles
However, Millais was attacked across the board for allowing his work to be
sullied by association with a commercial product. Marie Corelli wrote this
hysterical letter in response to seeing the ad:
Dear Sir John Millais!
...I get inwardly wrathful whenever I think of your "Bubbles" in the hands of Pears as a soap-
advertisement! Gods of Olympus! – I have seen and loved the original picture, – the most exquisite
and dainty child ever dreamed up, with the air of a baby Poet as well as of a small angel – and I

5. look upon all Pears' "posters", as gross libels both of your work and you! [...] "Bubbles" should hang
beside Sir Joshua's "Age of Innocence" in the National Gallery where the poor people could go and
see it with the veneration that befits all great art. (Corelli, "To John Millais", 24 Dec. 1895)
Thus began the opposition between advertising, and Art.
The First Advertising Agencies
However, it was not until the emergence of advertising agencies in the latter
part of the nineteenth century that advertising became a fully fledged
institution, with its own ways of working, and with its own creative values.
These agencies were a response to an increasingly crowded marketplace,
where manufacturers were realising that promotion of their products was vital
if they were to survive. They sold themselves as experts in communication to
their clients - who were then left to get on with the business of
manufacturing. Copywriters emerged who – for a fee – would craft a series of
promotional statements. Many of these men were aspiring novelists, or
journalists, who discovered they could more profitably turn their wordcraft to
the services of sales – John E. Powers was reportedly earning the vast sum of
US$100 per day writing copy in the 1890s. They joined forces with
professional illustrators who began to produce designs specifically for the
purpose of an advertisment.
A good early example of this is the advertising produced for Arrow Shirts by
the copywriting team of Earnest Calkins and Ralph Holden, who hired Joseph
Leyendecker to create an image for the campaign. Leyendecker used his real-
life partner Charles Beach as the model, and created a character who wasn't
so much about shirts as a whole lifestyle. Suave, crisply coiffed, impeccably
turned out in a sharply creased collar, the Arrow Shirt Man represented a

6. whole set of aspirational choices for the target audience, and formed the
basis of Arrow Shirt's advertising for the next quarter century.
Innovators like Claude Hopkins and Albert Lasker developed the scope and
sophistication of advertising in the early years of the twentieth century. Unlike
his predecessors, Hopkins was a great believer in learning all about the
product he was meant to be selling. He used the fact that Schlitz Beer steam
cleaned its bottles to promote the brand - notwithstanding that this was
common practice amongst breweries at the time. However, through
association by advertising, Schlitz became the brand associated with good
hygiene and purity. While Hopkins became an expert in the products he was
selling, Lasker focused on the target audience, closely monitoring ad
campaigns against sales curves.
Advertising and the First World War
Poster advertising was much more common in Europe than the US before
1914. From the 1870s on, French roadsides were adorned with cheaply
printed Art Nouveau lithographs, advertising, among other things, the Folies-
Bergère Cabaret, and Lefèvre Utile biscuits. The suffragettes in Britain used a
series of art posters to publicise their cause. When war broke out, all the
various governments involved turned to posters as propaganda. The main
requirement of fighting in World War I was young men to use as cannon
fodder. The 'ENLIST!' posters dreamed up by advertising agencies on both
sides of the Atlantic ensured a plentiful supply of recruits.

7. No less a political commentator than Hitler concluded (in Mein Kampf) that
Germany lost the war because it lost the propaganda battle: he did not make
the same mistake when it was his turn. One of the other consequences of
World War I was the increased mechanisation of industry – and increased
costs which had to be paid for somehow: hence the desire to create need in
the consumer which begins to dominate advertising from the 1920s onward.
Advertising Through The Great Depression

8. Post war affluence and optimism was short and sweet. Spurred by the
introduction of "hire purchase" agreements, consumers treated themselves to
costly new goods such as cars, washing machines, and radiograms, which all
needed ads. Advertising quickly took advantage of the new mass media, using
cinema, and to a much greater extent, radio, to transmit commercial
messages to a widespread audience. The first radio ad appeared in 1922,
and, because direct selling was not permitted, broadcast a 'direct indirect'
message about the benefits of living in a particular development in Jackson
Heights, New York.
Radio Commercials from 1920s-40s —Old Time Radio
The public had an appetite for radio, but there was no real way to get them
to pay directly for the costly broadcasts. Advertising stepped in as the middle
component, paying the broadcasters for their listeners' time. This
arrangement led to the direct funding of radio dramas by, for instance,
Proctor & Gamble, hence the term 'soap opera'. However, when the Wall St.
stock market crashed in 1929, the media landscape changed forever.

9. Hard-hit consumers cut back on newspapers and listened to the radio in even
greater numbers. Cash-strapped newspapers and magazine owners put their
publications up for sale, only to see them absorbed into the developing news
conglomerates. Cinema attendance remained buoyant - picture palaces
offered the only avenue of escapism in the economic gloom. The tide of
advertising dollars that had flowed into print publications stemmed
considerably, and then started to turn in other directions.
Advertising spending plummeted by around 60% after the Crash, and didn't
return to 1920s levels until the early 1950s - although radio advertising spend
did increase significantly in this period. Ad agencies were hard hit, often
having to downsize considerably as the clients dried up. Perhaps as a result of
this, advertising got tougher. By the mid-1930s, the 'hard sell' had become
commonplace, with sex, violence and threats creeping into ads. Items were
marketed as necessities, rather than luxuries, with items like hats or
mouthwash positioned as vital tools in the battle to get, and stay, ahead.
Rather than reassuring consumers, ads bullied and hustled, playing on fears
in order to attach their target audience's sparse disposable income to their
brand.
One agency that thrived during the Depression was Young & Rubicam. They
focused on research and facts, investigating the impact of successful and
failed campaigns. In 1932, agency head Raymond Rubicam hired an academic
named George Gallup as the first ever market research director in adland.
Gallup developed a lot of the techniques still used today to find out which ads
work and why - questionnaires, focus groups, listeners' panels - as well as
devising audience measurement techniques (the coincidental method for
radio, and the impact method for print and TV).
Advertising & TV
The 1950s not only brought postwar affluence to the average citizen but
whole new glut of material goods for which need had to be created. Not least
of these was the television set. In America it quickly became the hottest
consumer property - no home could be without one. And where the sets
went, the advertisers followed, spilling fantasies about better living through
buying across the hearthrug in millions of American homes. The UK and
Europe, with government controlled broadcasting, were a decade or so behind
America in allowing commercial TV stations to take to the air, and still have
tighter controls on sponsorship and the amount of editorial control advertisers
can have in a programme. This is the result of some notable scandals in the
US, where sponsors interfered in the content and outcome of quiz shows in

10. order to make their product seem, by association, more sexy. See the
excellent Quiz Show (1994), directed by Robert Redford which deals with the
disillusionment of the American people.
Unhappy with the ethical compromise of the single-sponsor show, NBC
executive Sylvester Weaver came up with the idea of selling not whole shows
to advertisers, but separate, small blocks of broadcast time. Several different
advertisers could buy time within one show, and therefore the content of the
show would move out of the control of a single advertiser - rather like a print
magazine. This became known as the magazine concept, or participation
advertising, as it allowed a whole variety of advertisers to access the
audience of a single TV show. Thus the 'commercial break' as we know it was
born.
Madison Avenue - how the Mad Men came to be
Although advertising agencies had begun to flock to offices in Madison
Avenue, New York, before the war, it was only in the heady days of post-war
prosperity that this street became the de facto headquarters of the US
advertising industry. A lot of new, 20+ storey office buildings were
constructed there in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and these prestigious
skyrise workspaces attracted agencies who wanted to exude glamour and
panache, and take advantage of all the fine restaurants that thronged the
street level.

11. By the 1950s, advertising was considered a profession in its own right, not
just the remit of failed newspapermen or poets. It attracted both men and
women who wanted the thrill of using their creativity to make some serious
cash. Hard-working (early heart attacks were common), hard drinking (those
legendary three martini lunches), unconventional and often amoral, the
flannel-suited Ad Man became a recognisable archetype, the epitome of a
new kind of cool. Cary Grant even played one in North By Northwest (1959).
For many, Englishman David Ogilvy embodied this quintessential type. He
started his own ad agency, and from the very beginning, parlayed his charm
and personality into the agency brand, using his British accent to stand out
from the crowd.
Ogilvy's advertising ethos involved bold creativity and risk-taking, but he
understood that advertising's main - indeed, only - function, was to sell. To
that end copy and pictures had to be clear, simple, and provide a direct
connection between customer and brand. He specialized, in the early days, in
attention-grabbing campaigns that relied on a clever idea rather than a huge
budget. One of his earliest, most successful campaigns was for Hathaway
Shirts. Like the Arrow Shirts team almost half a century before, he latched
onto an image that suggested a lifestyle, rather than just a clean collar. He
added a rakish eyepatch to the model (and to 25 years of subsequent

12. Hathaway models and the logo to this day), he intrigued the audience, who
would then read the copy to find out what was going on. Hooked. The
'Hathaway man' appeared in a variety of scenarios (buying a Renoir, at the
Opera, driving a tractor etc), and was in fact Baron George Wrangell, a
Russian aristocrat with 20/20 vision. Ogilvy only ran the ads in The New
Yorker magazine, adding to their allure. The Hathaway brand became the #1
best-selling dress shirt in the world.
Much has been written about David Ogilvy, especially as he was one of the
first ad men to recognize that if you create a story around an ad campaign,
you're getting a lot of free advertising. He made his agency part of the story-
telling process of a campaign. Although he disliked the label, Ogilvy was
hailed as a genius in his day, and more than a decade after his death, is still
very much considered a guru of modern advertising.
However, not all the ad industry archetypes being generated in Madison
Avenue in the 1950s were positive ones. In 1957, sociologist Vince Packard
published his exposé of the advertising industry, The Hidden Persuaders.
Packard accused the entire ad industry of psychologically manipulating the
public into buying products they didn't want or need, usually via embedded or
subliminal messages in ads and images. He also suggested these techniques
were being imported into politics, and were used to persuade voters to accept
politicians and policies they would otherwise have objected to. As a
conspiracy theory, it convinced, especially given the Cold War paranoia of the
era. People were used to the concept of 'the enemy within', on the alert for
subtle Communist propaganda, leery of the concept of mind control. The
Hidden Persuaders became a best-seller, and has coloured attitudes
towards the advertising industry – painting them as villains, out to exploit and
brainwash the public – ever since.

13. Recommended Reading
A sophisticated & professional industry called Indian Advertising
Indian Advertising starts with the hawkers calling out their wares right from the days when cities and markets first
began
Shop front signages
From street side sellers to press ads
The first trademarks
Handbills distributed separately from the products
18th Century

14. Concrete advertising history begins with classified advertising
Ads appear for the first time in print in Hickey's Bengal Gazette. India's first newspaper (weekly).
Studios mark the beginning of advertising created in India (as opposed to imported from England) Studios set up for
bold type, ornate fonts, more fancy, larger ads
Newspaper studios train the first generation of visualisers& illustrators
Major advertisers: Retailers like Spencer's, Army & Navy and Whiteaway& Laidlaw
Marketing promotions: Retailers' catalogues provided early example
Ads appear in newspapers in the form of lists of the latest merchandise from England
Patent medicines: The first brand as we know them today were a category of advertisers
Horlicks becomes the first 'malted milk' to be patented on 5th June 1883 (No. 278967).
The 1900s
1905
- B Dattaram& Co claims to be the oldest existing Indian agency in
Girgaum in Bombay
1912
- ITC (then Imperial Tobacco Co. Ltd.) launches Gold Flake
1920s
- Enter the first foreign owned ad agencies
- Gujarat Advertising and Indian Advertising set up
- Expatriate agencies emerge: Alliance Advertising, Tata Publicity
- LA Stronach's merges into today's Norvicson Advertising
- D J Keymer gives rise to Ogilvy & Mather and Clarion
1925

15. - LR Swami & Co, Madras
1926
- LA Stronach& Co (India) Pr. Ltd, Bombay starts
- Agency called National set up for American rather than British
Advertisers
- American importers hire JaganNathJaini, then advertising manager
of Civil and Military Gazette, Lahore. National today is still run by
Jaini's family
- Beginning of multinational agencies
- J Walter Thompson (JWT) opened to service General Motors business
1928
- BOMAS Ltd (Formerly DJ Keymer& Co Ltd) set up
1929
- J Walter Thompson Co Pr. Ltd formed
Indian agencies, foreign advertising in the thirties
1931
- National Advertising Service Pr. Ltd. Bombay set up
- Universal Publicity Co, Calcutta formed
1934
- VenkatraoSista opens Sista Advertising and Publicity Services as first
full service Indian agency

16. 1935
- Indian Publicity Bureau Pr Ltd, Calcutta established
1936
- Krishna Publicity Co Pr. Ltd, Kanpur begins operations
- Studio RatanBatra Pr. Ltd, Bombay established
- Indian Broadcasting Company becomes All India Radio (AIR)
1938
- Jayendra Publicity, Kolhapur started
1939
- Lever's advertising department launches Dalda - the first major
example of a brand and a marketing campaign specifically developed
for India
- The Press Syndicate Ltd, Bombay set up
Indianising advertisements in the forties
1940
- Navanitlal& Co., Ahmedabad set up
1941
- Lux signs LeelaChitnis as the first Indian film actress to endorse the
product
- Hindustan Thompson Associates (HTA), the current incarnation of
JWT, coins the Balanced Nourishment concept to make Horlicks
more relevant to India

17. - Green's Advertising Service Agents, Bombay formed
1943
- Advertising & Sales Promotion Co (ASP), Calcutta established
1944
- Dazzal, Bombay comes into existence
- Ranjit Sales & Publicity Pr. Ltd, Bombay started
1945
- Efficient Publicities Pr. Ltd, Madras set up
- Tom & Bay (Advertising) Pr. Ltd., Poona begins operations in India
1946
- Eastern Psychograph Pr. Ltd., Bombay set up
- Everest Advertising Pr. Ltd, Bombay established
1947
- Grant Advertising Inc, Bombay formed
- Swami Advertising Bureau, Sholapur started
1948
- RC Advertising Co, Bombay set up
- Phoenix Advertising Pr. Ltd, Calcutta formed
Corporate advertising in the fifties

18. 1950s
- Radio Ceylon and Radio Goa become the media option
1951
- Vicks VapoRub: a rub for colds, causes ripples with its entry
in the balm market
1952
- Shantilal G Shah & Co, Bombay
1954
- Advertising Club, Mumbai set up
- Express Advertising Agency, Bombay
- India Publicity Co. Pr. Ltd., Calcutta
1956
- Aiyars Advertising & Marketing, Bombay
- Clarion Advertising Services Pr. Ltd, Calcutta
1957
- VividhBharati kicks off
1958
- Shree Advertising Agency, Bombay
1959
- Associated Publicity, Cuttack

19. Creative revolution in the sixties
1960
- Advertising Accessories, Trichur started
- Marketing Advertising Associates, Bombay set up
1961
- Industrial Advertising Agency, Bombay comes into existence
- BalMundkur quits BOMAS to set up Ulka the same year
1962
- India's television's first soap opera - Teesra Rasta enthralls
viewers
1963
- BOMAS changes names to SH Benson's
- Stronach's absorbed into Norvicson
- Lintas heading for uncertainty
- Levers toying with giving its brands to other agencies
- NargisWadia sets up Interpub
- Wills Filter Tipped cigarettes launched and positioned as made for
each other, filter and tobacco match
1965
- Kersey Katrak sets up Mass Communication and Marketing (MCM)
1966
- Government persuaded to open up the broadcast media

20. - AyazPeerbhoy sets up Marketing and Advertising Associates (MAA)
1967
- First commercial appears on VividhBharati
1968
- NariHira sets up Creative Unit
- India wins the bid for the Asian Advertising Congress
1969
- Sylvester daCunha left Stronach's to run ASP; later sets up
daCunha Associates
1970
- Frank Simoes sets up Frank Simoes Associates
The problematic seventies
1970-1978
- National Readership Studies provided relevant data on
consumers' reading habits
1970
- Concept of commercial programming accepted by All India Radio
- HasanRezavi gives the very first spot on Radio Ceylon
1971
- Benson's undergo change in name to Ogilvy, Benson & Mather

21. 1972
- Western Outdoor Advertising Pvt Ltd (WOAPL) introduces first
closed circuit TV (CCT) in the country at the race course in
Mumbai
1973
- RK Swamy/BBDO established
1974
- MCM goes out of business
- Arun Nanda &AjitBalakrishnan set up Rediffusion
1975
- Ravi Gupta sets up Trikaya Grey
1976
- Commercial Television initiated
1978
- First television commercial seen
1979
- Ogilvy, Benson & Mather's name changes to Ogilvy & Mather
Glued to the television in the eighties
1980
- Mudra Communications Ltd set up
- King-sized Virginia filter cigarette enters market with brand name
of 'Charms'

22. 1981
- Network, associate of UTV, pioneers cable television in India
1982
- The biggest milestone in television was the Asiad '82 when
television turned to colour transmission
- Bombay Dyeing becomes the first colour TV ad
- 13th Asian Advertising Congress in New Delhi
- Media planning gets a boost
1983
- Maggi Noodles launched to become an overnight success
- Canco Advertising Pvt. Ltd. founded
- ManoharShyam Joshi's Hum Log makes commercial television
come alive
- Mudra sponsors first commercial telecast of a major sporting event
with the India-West Indies series
1984
- Hum Log, Doordarshan's first soap opera in the colour era is
born
- Viewers still remember the sponsor (Vicco) of Yeh Jo Hai
Zindagi!
1985
- Mudra makes India's first telefilm, Janam
1985-86
- 915 new brands of products and services appearing on the Indian

23. Market
1986
- Sananda is born on July 31. The Bengali magazine stupefies India
by selling 75,000 copies within three hours of appearing on the
newsstands.
- Mudra Communications creates India's first folk-history TV
serial Buniyaad. Shown on DD, it becomes the first of the
mega soaps
- Price quality positioning of Nirma detergent cakes boost sales
1988
- AAAI's Premnarayan Award instituted
1989
- Advertising Club Bombay begins a biennial seminar called
'Advertising that Works'
- Advertising & Marketing (A&M) magazine launched
Tech savvy in the nineties
1990
- Marks the beginning of new medium Internet
- Agencies open new media shops; go virtual with websites and
Internet advertising
- Brand Equity (magazine) of The Economic Times is born

24. 1991
- First India-targetted satellite channel, Zee TV starts broadcast
- Close on the throes of the Gulf War enters STAR (Satellite
Transmission for Asia Region)
1992
- Spectrum, publisher of A&M, constitutes its own award known as
'A&M Awards'
- Scribes and media planners credit The Bold And The Beautiful
serial on STAR Plus channel as a soap that started the cultural
invasion
1993
- India's only advertising school, MICA (Mudra Institute of
Communications Ahmedabad), is born
- Tara on Zee TV becomes India's first female-centric soap
1995
- Advertising Club of Bombay calls its awards as Abby
- Country's first brand consulting firm, SABRE (Strategic Advantage for
Brand Equity) begins operations
1996
- The ad fraternity hits big time for the first time by bagging three
awards at the 43rd International Advertising Festival, Cannes
- Sun TV becomes the first regional TV channel to go live 24 hours
a day on all days of the week
1997
- Media boom with the growth of cable and satellite; print medium
sees an increase in titles, especially in specialised areas

25. - Government turns towards professional advertising in the private
sector for its VDIS campaigns
- Army resorts to the services of private sector agencies
- Advertising on the Internet gains popularity
- Equitor Consulting becomes the only independent brand consultancy
company in the country
- Several exercises in changing corporate identity
- For the first time ever, Indians stand the chance of winning the $ 1-
million booty being offered by Gillette as part of its Football World
Cup promo 1998
- Events assume important role in marketing mix
- Rise of software TV producers banking on ad industry talent
- Reinventing of cinema -advertising through cinema begins
1998
- Lintas becomes AmmiratiPuriLintas (APL)
1999
- B2B site agencyfaqs.com launched on September 28, 1999
- The Advertising Club Bombay announces the AdWorks Trophy
In the new millennium
2000
- Mudra launches magindia.com - India's first advertising and marketing
Gallery

26. - Lintas merges with Lowe Group to become Lowe Lintas and Partners
(LLP)
- bigideasunlimited.com - a portal offering free and fee ideas for money
launched by AlyquePadamsee and Sam Mathews
- Game shows like KaunBanegaCrorepati become a rage; media buying
industry is bullish on KBC
- KyunkiSaasBhiKabhiBahuThi marks the return of family-
oriented soap on TV
- French advertising major Publicis acquires Maadhyam
2001
- Trikaya Grey becomes Grey Worldwide
- Bharti'sRs 2.75-crore corporate TV commercial, where a baby
girl is born in a football stadium, becomes the most expensive
campaign of the year
2002
- Lowe Lintas& Partners rechristened Lowe Worldwide
- For the first time in the history of HTA, a new post of president is
created. Kamal Oberoi is appointed as the first president of HTA