The history of modern advertising is a history of deceit, or at least the suspicion of deceit. Advertising as it is now understood began to take shape in the seventeenth century, and almost immediately it was censured by literary observers for its untruths. Daniel Defoe, looking back on 1665–6 in his Journal of the Plague Year, registers his disgust at seeing ‘Posts of Houses, and Corners of Streets … plaster’d over with Doctor’s Bills, and Papers of ignorant Fellows’ selling ‘INFALIBLE preventive Pills against the Plague’ and ‘NEVER-FAILING Preservatives against the infection’. John Bunyan, in Pilgrim’s Progress, uses the metaphor of advertising to condemn what he considers the excesses and idolatrous deceits of Roman Catholicism: ‘the ware of Rome and her merchandise is greatly promoted in [Vanity] [F]air’. In the eighteenth century, as advertising flowered not only in public spaces but in periodicals, Richard Sheridan introduced his character Puff (a verb, by then, commonly used to describe the lies-by-exaggeration of advertising), who embodied the public distrust in the veracity and authenticity of periodical advertisements. Puff boasts, ‘I first taught them to crowd their advertisements with panegyrical superlatives, each epithet rising above the other, like the bidders in their own auction rooms! From me they learned to inlay their phraseology with variegated chips of exotic metaphor.’

In the nineteenth century, with the concurrent growth of periodicals, of literacy and of public taste for new books, Thomas Macaulay decried what he called the ‘new trickery’ of book advertisements:

Thomas Carlyle, in Past and Present, added his own denunciation of that ‘all-deafening blast of Puffery’, perhaps missing the irony of his metaphor from loud noises. Many twentieth-century critiques, following Marx and taking into account the possibility of psychological lies, adjusted ‘puffery’ into ‘commodity fetishism’ and ‘kitsch’, both of which retain the basic metaphor of disproportion found in ‘puffery’.