A prophet of modern advertising: Germany's Karl Knies

The analysis of advertising propounded by the German economist Karl Knies in 1857 was a milestone in the development of advertising thought. Knies was the only economic thinker to treat advertising seriously and positively at a time when it first began to take on its modern intensity and pervasiveness; his contemporaries either ignored it or judged it by its excesses, (e.g, tawdry patent medicine ads). Knies perceived the increasingly important information role that advertising was to play in economic life, as expanding markets made person-to-person interaction impractical. Explaining how it played that role, he identified the basic themes of subsequent advertising research: the communication process, analysis of advertising effects and buyer psychology, target audience selection, and media analysis. After being neglected initially, Knies' work eventually had great impact on German advertising thought, but has remained unknown in the United States. The saga of Knies' analysis is a rich illustration of advertising's intellectual history.