Today advertising is big business as firms spend huge budgets on promoting their products. While celebrities supplement their income persuading us to eat everything from crisps to luxury frozen meals, sports stars can earn seven figure sums from sponsorship deals and endorsements. We tend to think of advertising as a modern phenomenon, one of the evils of a media dominated lifestyle, but it was ever thus. An early example of the flyer, fodder for the recycling box today, was produced by Smith, Nash, Kemble and Travers 'wholesalers and retailers,' who in 1779 informed their customers of a sugar shortage due to 'the loss of Grenada.' And by the beginning of the 19th century no entreperneurial opportunity to advertise was missed from bill boards to sandwich boards and of course, newspapers and magazines. Swindon newspaper proprietor William Morris called his broadsheet the Swindon Advertiser, because it did just that. Regent Street was a proliferation of adver...