As advertising blitz in my social media feeds put me off them, a reminder of a fake ad 2,700 years ago in China
- I am being put off social media by the volume of ads in my feeds. Advertising has a long history, with a fake ad recorded in China 2,700 years ago
- The sophistication of a less ancient ad from 1,000 years ago in Shandong province, China, would not put an ad agency to shame if they came up with it today
I am reducing the amount of time I spend on social media simply because I am sick and tired of the ad blitz whenever I log on.
More than half of my feeds are advertisements, which interestingly, always feature products or services that I had just bought or searched for online.
The “hide ad” features on these platforms do not work in the way I like them to work. Even though I always flag “irrelevant” as the reason for not wishing to see the ads, with the hope that the algorithms will ease up on, or even stop, its onslaught of similar sponsored messages, I continue to get repetitive paid content for coffee and dental clinics, to give a couple of recent examples.
I believe myself to be immune to the tactics of advertising. Of course, I avail myself of the essential product information contained in advertisements, but I think I am sufficiently distrustful of unverifiable product claims, or cynical attempts to appeal to my emotions or aspirations.
But such is the insidious nature of advertisements that even the bad ones, or should we say, especially the bad ones, live on in our subconscious, ever ready to rear their ugly heads whenever we find ourselves in need of a caffeine fix or a root canal, for example.
The earliest mention of a rudimentary form of advertising in China is a story set in the state of Qi (present-day Shandong) about 2,700 years ago, where a butcher hung a cow’s head at his shopfront to advertise the beef he presumably sold, but he was in fact selling horse meat.
The story inspired the saying, “hanging a goat’s head but selling dog meat”, referring to false advertising or an action not being what it purports to be.
The earliest evidence of a more sophisticated form of advertising, one that would not be unfamiliar in our times, is a copperplate measuring 13.2cm by 12.4cm (5.2 by 4.9 inches) from the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) that was used for printing multiple copies of handbills or other forms of print advertisement.
This copperplate printed advertisements for the Ji’nan Liu Family’s Artisanal Needle Shop, large quantities of which were presumably handed out in the city of Ji’nan (also in Shandong).
It featured a brand logo that depicted the legendary rabbit on the moon pounding medicinal herbs with a staff. To distinguish itself from the competition, two lines of words on either side of the logo exhorted would-be customers to “look for the little white rabbit at the shopfront”.
The lower half of the print was a line that described the product: “We buy high quality steel to make fine needles that will service you well at your homes. Discounts are available for wholesale purchases.”
The rabbit logo was an early example of subliminal messaging in advertising. While no needles were featured in the logo design, many people would associate the staff that the rabbit used as an oversized pestle with a story popular during the Song period, in which an old lady seen grinding a thick iron staff down to a fine needle taught the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai (701–762) the virtue of perseverance.
The simple, familiar image of the lunar rabbit and an inspiring story involving a staff were cleverly linked together to sell needles.
The advertisement reinforced the brand image by drawing attention to the “little white rabbit” logo, described the product in glowing terms, and offered discounts. This could be something created by an advertising agency anywhere in the world today.
It boggles the mind to think that this ad was made close to a thousand years ago. It is conceivable that there were other, similar ads from the same period or even earlier, but physical evidence of their existence has yet to be found.
