Outdoor advertising

?Roman merchants . . . had a sense of advertising. The ruins of Pompeii contain signs in stone or terra-cotta, advertising what the shops were selling: a row of hams for a butcher shop, a cow for a dairy, a boot for a shoemaker. The Pompeiians also knew the art of telling their story to the public by means of painted wall signs. . . .

Outdoor advertising has proved to be one of the most enduring forms of advertising. It survived the decline of the Roman empire to become the decorative art of European inns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That was still an age of widespread illiteracy, so inns vied with one another in creating attractive signs that all could recognize. This accounts for the charming names of old inns, especially in England?such as the Three Squirrels, the Man in the Moon, the Hole in the Wall. In 1614, England passed a law, probably the earliest on advertising, that prohibited signs from extending more than 8 feet out from a building. (Longer signs pulled down too many house fronts.) Another law required signs to be high enough to give clearance to an armored man on horseback. In 1740, the first printed outdoor poster (referred to as a ?hoarding?) appeared in London.?

?J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, from Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, eleventh edition, 1990.