The Evolution of Advertising: From Print to Programmatic

For most of its history, advertising has gone where people's attention went. When people read newspapers, advertisers bought space in them. When families gathered around the radio and then the television, advertisers bought time. When people moved online, to search engines, social networks and phones, the money followed them there.

This guide traces that history from print to programmatic buying. It explains what each new medium changed for the people paying for ads, where the money goes now, and what the pattern means for a marketing leader deciding where the next budget should go.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan is a partner in Fieldtrip, a group of marketing agencies, which is mentioned in this article.

A timeline of advertising, from broadcast to programmatic

Print came first: newspapers, magazines, posters and signs carried advertising long before broadcasting. Advertisers bought space and chose where their message would appear. Radio and television added the purchase of airtime, and the web later made the message clickable. The table follows those later milestones.

Radio and television: buying time and mass attention

American commercial radio found its business model in 1922. According to NPR's account of the first radio commercial (opens in a new tab), AT&T ran its New York station, WEAF, the way it ran the telephone: anyone could pay for time and bring their own message. The first customer, a developer of apartments in Jackson Heights, bought ten minutes for $50 on August 28, 1922. WEAF called the service "toll broadcasting", and it became the financial model for American commercial broadcasting.

Television added pictures. Bulova's company history (opens in a new tab) says it ran the world's first TV ad in 1941, during a Brooklyn Dodgers game against the Philadelphia Phillies, with the line "America runs on Bulova time." The medium grew quickly after the Second World War. The Digital Public Library of America's exhibition on radio and television (opens in a new tab) notes that only a few thousand American homes had a set before 1947, 12 million did five years later, and half of American homes had one by 1955.

For advertisers, broadcast meant buying an audience in bulk: you paid for the time slot, and everyone tuned in heard or saw the same message.

The web made advertising clickable

On October 27, 1994, the first banner ad went live on hotwired.com. Joe McCambley, who wrote it, recalled in 2013 (opens in a new tab) that 44% of the people who saw it clicked on it over four months. The advertiser was AT&T, whose station had aired that first paid radio commercial 72 years earlier.

McCambley gives three reasons it worked. It was part of AT&T's larger "You Will" campaign on TV, radio and print. It offered a real experience, a virtual tour of museums. And it was made with good intentions toward the people who saw it. There were also only six advertisers lining up for HotWired at the time. By 2013, he wrote, banners were clicked by about four in every 10,000 people who saw them.

A clickable banner put the response inside the ad: a reader could follow it immediately, and advertisers could count those clicks.

Search and social: ads matched to intent and identity

Search advertising placed an ad next to the exact question a person had just typed. Google's October 23, 2000 announcement of AdWords (opens in a new tab) described keyword ads shown beside the results for matching searches, bought through a self-service system with real-time changes and reports on impressions and click-through rates. About 350 businesses and agencies had used it during the beta that month. At launch it was priced by impressions, from $10 to $15 per thousand depending on the ad's position.

Social advertising added who the person was. Facebook launched Facebook Ads on November 6, 2007 (opens in a new tab) as a system to "target advertising to the exact audiences they want", with business Pages, ads that combined an advertiser's message with friends' actions, and an analytics tool for marketers. More than 100,000 Pages went live that day.

Phones then carried both everywhere. In the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report for 2025 (opens in a new tab), IAB chief executive David Cohen names mobile among the most consequential shifts in digital advertising over the past 30 years, for "putting a connected computer in everyone's pocket at all times."

Together, search, social and mobile moved advertising from broad audiences to individuals: what they were looking for, who they were, and a device that kept them reachable at all times.

Programmatic advertising: automating media buying

Programmatic buying automated the purchase itself. The IAB/PwC report's definition includes real-time auctions as well as deals with agreed prices or guaranteed inventory. The IAB Tech Lab's OpenRTB page (opens in a new tab) describes real-time bidding as a way to put "an individual ad impression" up for bid in an automated auction, in real time. The OpenRTB group formed in November 2010 to write an open protocol for that trading, and the standard now also covers connected TV.

The same IAB/PwC report puts US programmatic advertising revenue, excluding search, at $162.4 billion in 2025, up 20.5%.

For a marketing team, programmatic buying means software executes part of the media plan. The targeting data, placement choices and buying rules therefore matter alongside price.

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A simplified comparison of buying models discussed in the article. These models coexist; the timeline does not imply one completely replaced another.

Privacy: limits on tracking and measurement

The same precision raised a question about consent. In the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation (opens in a new tab) has applied since May 25, 2018. On Apple devices, Apple's developer guidance (opens in a new tab) requires apps on iOS 14.5 or later to obtain the user's permission before tracking them across other companies' apps and websites for targeted advertising or advertising measurement.

Browsers are the third front. In April 2025, Google said (opens in a new tab) it would not roll out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies in Chrome. Users keep choosing in Chrome's privacy and security settings, and Incognito mode already blocks third-party cookies by default.

So plan for less tracking and less complete measurement where people have not given permission, and value the data customers share with you directly.

Where advertising money goes now

In the United States, internet advertising revenue grew from $7.3 billion in 2003 to $294.6 billion in 2025, according to the IAB/PwC report.

The report says search growth slowed, from 15.9% in 2024 to 11.0%, in line with leading search platforms building AI-driven search into their advertising. Digital video grew fastest of the ad formats; social media, which the report counts as a channel across formats, grew faster still.

Worldwide, WPP Media's June 2026 forecast (opens in a new tab) expects global advertising revenue, excluding US political ads, to grow 8.9% to $1.3 trillion in 2026. It finds the market highly concentrated: Alphabet, Meta and Amazon control 57.6% of it outside China, and no traditional media owner is in the global top ten.

What may come next

Forecasts are not history, but they show where the money is expected to move. WPP Media's June 2026 forecast expects generative search to be the fastest-scaling channel it has recorded, growing from $5.1 billion in 2026 to over $100 billion by 2030. The IAB/PwC report projects further growth in online video and connected TV in 2026. Whether or not those forecasts hold, the history in the next section argues for treating any new channel as a test before it becomes a fixed line in the budget.

Why marketing tactics lose their edge

The contrast between McCambley's figure for the first banner and banners generally in 2013 is an example of what Andrew Chen called the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs (opens in a new tab): over time, every marketing strategy ends up with low click-through rates. Chen uses the same HotWired banner as his example, though he gives it a 78% click-through rate against McCambley's 44%. His main reasons are that novelty wears off, competitors copy what works, and campaigns expand to audiences that care less.

I saw the same thing in outbound sales. I moved heavily into LinkedIn outreach in early 2017, and it was "a gold mine in those early days." By 2020 it was full of automation bots and generic messages. That year I summed up Chen's idea this way: "every marketing tactic is great when it starts, but then everyone starts doing it and people become immune to the tactic. So then new tactics have to be formed."

The history doesn't say which channel will be next. It suggests that today's best-performing channel is likely to get more crowded. Why marketing tactics decay covers how to tell when that is happening to yours.

What the history means for your marketing mix

The temptation, with every new medium, is to be everywhere at once. I think the history argues for the opposite. In 2021 I said on my podcast that "most companies that are successful have one or two marketing channels that work really, really well for them." My advice was to test two or three channels at a time for about three months. Then systematize the one that works and scale it until it reaches saturation.

For a marketing team with an established mix, that becomes a short set of questions to ask before moving budget into a new channel:

That is the habit I'd take from this history: find a medium that works for you, learn it properly and keep watching for the moment it starts to fade.

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The article’s marketing diagnosis shown as four distinct checks. A new channel will not automatically repair an offer or targeting problem.