Reeves is one of the founders of modern advertising, but the oldest surviving print advertisement was produced in 1477 by William Caxton to promote his publication The Pyes of Salisbury #The first great theorist of advertising was John E. Kennedy, a former Mountie who in 1904 defined advertising as "salesmanship in print". Until then, ad agencies were content merely to announce the availability of products#Names of advertising copywriters who have gone on to be famous novelists are: Salman Rushdie, Fay Wheldon and Dorothy L. Sayers #Where no unique selling point existed, Reeves would create one. He persuaded Colgate to spend $300,000 to authenticate the claim that washing the face for a full minute with Palmolive soap would improve the skin#Reeves pioneered the development of dispersal - of selling to the greatest number by using several different media. It was, he said, about "getting a unique selling proposition into the heads of the most people at the lowest possible cost"#Reeves' development of his unique selling point idea helped build the Ted Bates advertising agency from an income of $4,000,000 a year in the Forties to $150,000,000 a year by the early Sixties#Reeves was responsible for the development of regular sampling to test how effective advertising had been. By the late Fifties, the Ted Bates agency was interviewing thousands of people at 275 different locations across the US#In 1961, the year Reeves wrote his book Reality in Advertising, $12,000,000,000 was spent on adverts in America#Political parties have taken Reeves' message to heart to such an extent that politicians are now trained not to cover more than three unique selling points in each speech or interview#Today, there are over 2,000 ad agencies in the United Kingdom employing around 15,000 people#The total advertising expenditure in the US in 1994 was $147 billion. In Britain the same year it was just over £10 billion pounds - or nearly two per cent of the gross domestic product#The Ted Bates agency is now part of Saatchi & Saatchi, who achieved such prominence in Britain in the Eighties for their innovative campaigns on behalf of the Conservative Party
