The words are there, pressed in neat rows of characters on simple clay tablet. It is a listing of the services of a shoemaker, a scribe and an ointment dealer. They were inscribed in Babylon sometime around 3,000 BCE. As far as anyone knows, this clay tablet represents the earliest known example of written advertising.
In the five millennia since, new communication technologies have arisen and each time a new one emerges, advertising has always been adapted to it....