While political economist Joseph Schumpeter was not in advertising, he probably could have been. The advertising world has evolved as our technology has. The constant innovation in advertising has been the constant use of new technology to convey a marketing message. Over the span of millennia, we have gone from advertisements brushed on papyrus to advertisements tailored to suit individual consumers on social media. In between those two milestones are ads made possible by the printing press (everything from pamphlets to magazines), the telephone, the radio and television. However, ethical marketing is relatively new. That very first advertisement from ancient Egypt that I mentioned on my homepage, well, that weaver was looking for his slave (Kernan, 2021). At the end of his advertisement, he offered a plug to get the public to buy the best fabric woven in Thebes (Kernan, 2021). You can read all about it here. Medium The First Ad in Human History. From a long, long, long time ago | by Sean Kernan | Better Marketing The world's first advertisement doesn't seem to be too ethical to me. After the article describes the world's first advertisement, the author takes us through a brief summary of the history of advertising up to the nineteenth century.

The sixty-second video to the left entertainingly takes us through the history of advertising from the eighteenth century to today.

Regardless of the medium used to present the advertisement, marketing has a long history of lacking scruples. Historically, advertisements have been sexist, racist, ageist, and deceptive. Even today, there are ethical questions surrounding advertising on social media and how Facebook's algorithms are inherently racist (Zang, 2022).

The next page will demonstrate historic examples of sexism in advertising and contrast those examples with a contemporary advertisement that empowers women.