Advertising reinvents itself every 30 years. Astrology may explain why

Every technological revolution eventually becomes an advertising revolution. New media do more than give advertisers another place to sell. They change how brands communicate, how agencies work, how audiences are measured and, eventually, how consumers relate to products. Radio gave brands a voice. Television gave them movement and colour. Satellite television multiplied their reach. The internet made advertising interactive and measurable. Smartphones made digital communication an almost constant presence in everyday life. Social media turned consumers themselves into publishers and influencers. Artificial Intelligence is now beginning to transform the industry once again.

 Look back at some of advertising’s most important periods of reinvention and an intriguing astrological pattern emerges. Roughly thirty years separate several of them, corresponding closely with Saturn’s 29.5-year journey around the zodiac and, particularly, its recurring passage through Aquarius and Pisces.

 In astrology, Saturn represents structure, discipline, endurance, limitation and transformation. It tests established systems, exposes weaknesses and forces adaptation or restructuring. Aquarius, one of the signs traditionally ruled by Saturn, represents innovation, technology, networks, unconventional thinking and challenges to established structures. Pisces, which follows Aquarius, has a different character. It represents imagination, imagery, creativity and the dissolution of boundaries. Venus, the planet associated with beauty, art, aesthetics, attraction and glamour, is exalted in Pisces.

 Across several Saturn cycles, an interesting sequence appears. Aquarius coincides with changes in the technology, networks or structures through which advertising reaches people. Pisces often coincides with the creative use of those new possibilities. Aries, which follows Pisces and begins the zodiacal cycle again, can then coincide with a period of rebuilding, experimentation and the emergence of new models around what has developed.

 The pattern can be traced back almost a century.

 The Great Depression devastated advertising in the early 1930s. Consumer spending collapsed after 1929, companies reduced budgets, newspapers and magazines lost advertising revenue, and agencies were forced to cut staff. The buoyant consumerism of the 1920s suddenly belonged to another world.

 Yet even as the established advertising business struggled, a relatively young medium was becoming extraordinarily powerful: radio.

 Radio could establish a relationship between advertiser and consumer that print could never quite replicate. It entered the living room and could speak, sing, entertain and tell stories. Agencies soon realised that they were dealing with much more than another place to insert advertisements.

 Companies sponsored entire programmes, while agencies became involved in developing and producing them. Procter & Gamble and other manufacturers of household products sponsored serialized dramas aimed particularly at women. 'Ma Perkins', which began in 1933 and was sponsored by Procter & Gamble’s Oxydol, became one of the best-known examples. The relationship became so deeply embedded in popular culture that these programmes eventually acquired a name that survives today: soap operas.

 Advertising and entertainment were becoming intertwined. The same principle survives in branded entertainment, sponsored content and creator partnerships today. Instead of merely interrupting entertainment, the advertiser can become part of it.

 Then came an important astrological transition. Saturn entered Aquarius in March 1934.

 Radio had already been growing rapidly, but the mid-1930s saw broadcasting become increasingly entrenched as a national advertising system. The Aquarian symbolism is appropriate: a relatively new technology had created a network capable of carrying the same voices, entertainment and commercial messages simultaneously into millions of homes.

 Measurement was becoming increasingly important as well. George Gallup worked with Young & Rubicam, while Arthur Nielsen’s research business grew in importance. Advertising was becoming more systematic and data-conscious, anticipating the increasingly sophisticated audience measurement that would later become central to television and digital advertising.

 Saturn moved into Pisces in March 1937. By then radio was no longer simply a technological novelty. It had become entertainment, companionship and an extraordinarily powerful commercial medium. By 1938, radio had become one of the dominant advertising media in the United States.

 The transition is interesting. Aquarius had coincided with the development of the network and the establishment of a new advertising system. Pisces represents imagination, entertainment and the dissolution of boundaries. In radio, the imagery existed in the listener’s mind, while commercial communication increasingly merged with music, drama, comedy and storytelling. Venus, associated with beauty, art and creative expression, is exalted in Pisces.

 Radio’s growing persuasive power also attracted scrutiny. The Depression had encouraged harder-selling techniques, stronger claims, testimonials and “reason-why” advertising. Consumer activists increasingly questioned exaggerated and deceptive claims, and the Wheeler-Lea Act of 1938 strengthened the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to act against misleading advertising.

 A new advertising system had expanded rapidly. Creative and commercial possibilities developed around it. Greater institutionalisation, scrutiny and regulation followed.

 Saturn entered Aries in April 1939. Aries is the first sign of the zodiac and represents beginnings, initiative and the start of a new cycle. By then, radio advertising was no longer an experiment. Programme sponsorship, audience research and the commercial practices developed around broadcasting had helped establish a new advertising order.

 The world was about to enter the Second World War, which would transform advertising once again, but the foundations of modern broadcast advertising had been laid.

 Not every important advertising development, of course, belongs to the Aquarius-Pisces cycle. India offers an interesting example.

 'Binaca Geetmala', presented by Ameen Sayani on Radio Ceylon from 1952, became a cultural phenomenon and demonstrated the enormous power of attaching a commercial brand to popular entertainment. Its emergence coincided with Saturn’s transit through Virgo. In astrology, Virgo is associated with communication, commerce, organisation, classification and systems built around regular routines.

 The symbolism was remarkably appropriate. 'Binaca Geetmala' transformed popular film music into a structured weekly countdown, ranking songs and turning listening into a ritual for millions of Indians. Sayani’s unmistakable voice became part of that ritual, while the Binaca name became inseparable from the programme. Long before “branded content” became advertising jargon, the programme demonstrated how entertainment, regularity and intelligent brand association could create an enduring relationship with consumers.

 The relationship between brands and broadcasting in India deepened further when commercial advertising formally came to All India Radio’s Vividh Bharati service in 1967, initially in Bombay, Pune and Nagpur before expanding further. By then another landmark in Indian advertising had already appeared.

 The Amul girl emerged in October 1966, when Saturn was transiting Pisces, and developed into something far larger than a conventional butter campaign. Pisces is associated with imagination, imagery and the dissolution of conventional boundaries, while Venus, the planet of art, beauty and creativity, is exalted in the sign.

 Amul moved beyond straightforward product advertising and created a distinctive visual character through which the brand could comment on politics, films, cricket, celebrities and national events. Advertising merged with satire, popular culture and social commentary. Instead of repeatedly describing the virtues of butter, Amul entered the national conversation, creating a format that would remain relevant for decades.

 The campaign trusted its audience to understand puns, topical humour and references to current affairs. In its own distinctly Indian way, it reflected some of the same creative impulses that were transforming advertising internationally.

 The mid-to-late 1960s were, in fact, one of the great turning points in global advertising. Saturn moved through Aquarius and Pisces during this period, coinciding with profound changes in both the technology and creative language of the industry.

 Television was already established in the United States, but colour television dramatically expanded its possibilities. Networks accelerated their move towards colour programming around 1965 and 1966, and advertisers followed rapidly, even before colour television sets had reached most households.

 Colour gave advertisers a new creative palette. Automobiles could gleam. Food could look more appetising. Fashion became more vivid. Cosmetics could be demonstrated more effectively. Packaging itself could become part of the visual spectacle. Advertising became more cinematic, while art direction, photography, costumes, locations and visual identity acquired greater importance.

 The astrological sequence is striking. Saturn had been moving through Aquarius, associated with technological change and networks, before entering Pisces. Technological change was followed by an expansion of visual creativity. With Venus exalted in Pisces, the symbolism is particularly appropriate. Colour television did more than improve broadcasting technology. It gave advertisers a vastly richer palette through which to create desire.

 Technology alone, however, does not explain why the 1960s became such an important advertising era. Advertising itself was undergoing a creative rebellion.

 The Creative Revolution, associated particularly with Bill Bernbach and Doyle Dane Bernbach, challenged the conventions of the advertising establishment. Older formulas often relied heavily on repetition, authoritative claims and research-driven selling propositions. The new creative approach could be witty, understated, self-aware and irreverent.

 Volkswagen’s celebrated campaigns became emblematic of the change. Rather than pretending the Beetle was a large, glamorous American automobile, DDB acknowledged that it was small and unconventional and turned those apparent weaknesses into a personality. Advertising was beginning to trust the intelligence of its audience.

 The change coincided with a much larger cultural upheaval. Young people were becoming a formidable cultural and commercial force. Rock music, civil rights activism, anti-war protests, changing sexual attitudes, new fashions and the counterculture challenged the assumptions of the previous generation. Advertising absorbed these changes remarkably quickly.

 Pepsi’s “Pepsi Generation” campaign was particularly revealing. The product itself no longer needed to be the entire focus of the advertisement. The identity and lifestyle of the consumer could become the message. Brands increasingly sold attitudes and identities alongside products.

 There was an obvious irony. The counterculture rebelled against conformity and consumerism, while advertising borrowed its music, clothes, language and imagery to sell products. Rebellion itself became marketable.

 The technological transformation had been followed by a creative and cultural one.

 Approximately three decades later, a remarkably similar sequence unfolded.

 India entered the 1990s on the verge of enormous economic and cultural change. The liberalisation programme initiated in 1991 opened the economy to greater competition and foreign investment. New companies, products and brands began entering a market that had previously offered consumers far fewer choices.

 At the same time, the media environment was changing. Zee TV launched in 1992, becoming India’s first privately owned Hindi satellite television channel. Saturn entered Aquarius in 1993. Cable and satellite television expanded rapidly. Foreign networks and channels entered Indian homes. Star TV increased its presence. MTV and other international entertainment brands exposed young Indian audiences to global music, fashion and advertising styles. Cable operators mushroomed across cities and towns.

 The timing is striking. India liberalised its economy in 1991. Zee TV arrived in 1992. Saturn entered Aquarius in 1993. Satellite and cable networks were transforming the broadcasting structure, while foreign brands were changing the competitive environment.

 Then came the internet.

 On August 15, 1995, commercial internet services were formally launched in India by VSNL. Saturn was still in Aquarius. Initially, the internet was painfully slow, expensive and accessible to relatively few Indians. Its advertising significance was tiny compared with television and print, yet the foundations of another advertising system had arrived.

 Globally, the transformation was already gathering momentum. On October 27, 1994, HotWired had launched with some of the earliest commercial banner advertisements on the web. The most famous, for AT&T, invited users to click.

 That simple action represented a fundamental change. For decades, advertisers had estimated audiences. They could calculate approximately how many people bought a newspaper, watched a television programme or listened to a radio station. Research could measure awareness and purchasing behaviour. The internet made the advertisement itself interactive.

 Someone could see an advertisement, click on it and immediately enter the advertiser’s world. Impressions could be recorded. Clicks could be measured. Eventually purchases could be attributed to particular advertisements.

 Companies such as DoubleClick developed technology for serving and measuring advertising across websites. Cookies and databases created the foundations of increasingly sophisticated targeting. Impressions, clicks, click-through rates, CPMs, conversions, CPCs and eventually retargeting and programmatic advertising entered the industry’s vocabulary.

 Traditional media businesses largely sold audiences. Newspapers sold readers and television networks sold viewers. The internet increasingly allowed advertisers to target particular types of users and eventually particular behaviours. Advertising was beginning its long movement from mass communication towards personalisation.

 For Indian advertisers, meanwhile, satellite television and liberalisation were producing another transformation. Doordarshan had offered access to an extraordinary mass audience, but television was fragmenting. Brands had more places to advertise and consumers had more choices about what to watch. Advertisers increasingly had to think about different channels, programmes, demographics and audience segments.

Competition was also intensifying. International companies entered India or expanded their presence, while Indian companies modernised their marketing. Consumer categories became more crowded. Simply being available was no longer enough. Brands increasingly needed personalities.

As Saturn moved from Aquarius into Pisces, the structural transformation of the media environment was accompanied by an increasingly imaginative, emotional and entertainment-driven advertising culture. Satellite television brought a proliferation of channels, music videos, international programming, celebrity culture and more sophisticated commercials.

Pepsi’s Indian advertising captured the changing mood brilliantly. Campaigns such as “Yehi Hai Right Choice Baby, Aha!” spoke to a generation increasingly exposed to global popular culture and comfortable with consumer choice. Pepsi sold youth, irreverence and attitude alongside cola. Its later “Nothing Official About It” campaign around cricket demonstrated how effectively a brand could insert itself into popular culture without necessarily possessing the official sponsorship rights associated with an event.

Cadbury Dairy Milk underwent an equally important repositioning. Its celebrated cricket-field advertisement, in which a young woman runs onto the ground and dances uninhibitedly after a batsman reaches a milestone, helped move chocolate beyond its traditional association with children. Cadbury could now represent spontaneous adult joy.

Fevicol developed an equally distinctive personality through humour rooted deeply in Indian situations and behaviour. Creative leaders such as Piyush Pandey demonstrated that Indian advertising did not need to imitate Western advertising to appear sophisticated. It could draw strength from Indian language, humour, relationships, streets, villages and everyday life.

 Indian advertising was becoming simultaneously more global and more confidently local.

 The parallels with the 1960s are compelling. Aquarius had again coincided with changes to networks, technology and distribution. Pisces coincided with advertisers exploiting those possibilities through richer imagery, entertainment, emotion and creativity.

 Aquarius changed the network. Pisces changed what advertisers did with it.

 The internet would ultimately transform advertising far beyond anything imaginable in 1995. Search advertising became a gigantic business, e-commerce connected advertisements directly to transactions, and social networks accumulated unprecedented quantities of behavioural information. The next decisive development was the smartphone, which took the internet away from the desk and made it a near-continuous presence in everyday life.

 As smartphones and mobile internet became ubiquitous, the digital advertising ecosystem expanded dramatically. Online video became a mass medium, while platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp made visual communication, messaging and interaction with brands part of daily life. Social media allowed individuals to become publishers and broadcasters in their own right, giving rise to creators and influencers who could sometimes command audiences larger than those of traditional publications. Small businesses could advertise through search and social media, demonstrate products through video, communicate directly with customers and sell online without requiring access to traditional media.

 The smartphone also brought advertising and commerce unusually close together. The same device could be used to discover a product, see an advertisement, watch a review, compare prices, ask a friend about it, place an order and make a payment. The internet had reduced the cost of distribution and measurement; the smartphone made digital access continuous and ubiquitous, placing a publishing platform, broadcasting device, marketplace and payment gateway in billions of pockets.

 By the time the next Saturn cycle approached, much of the infrastructure required for another transformation was already in place.

 Generative Artificial Intelligence entered public consciousness dramatically with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, when Saturn was nearing the end of its transit through Capricorn. Just a few months later, in January 2023, Saturn entered Aquarius. The transit coincided with an extraordinary acceleration in AI development and adoption, and with growing disruption across industries.

 Advertising was among the industries immediately affected. Copy could be generated in seconds. Images could be created without photographers, models, sets or locations. Video generation advanced rapidly. Voiceovers could be synthesised. Campaigns could be translated and localised. AI could analyse audiences, recommend media allocations, generate creative variations and optimise performance.

 The pattern was familiar. Aquarius had again coincided with a technology capable of disrupting established structures, networks and ways of working.

 The current Saturn cycle has also coincided with significant restructuring in radio. Saturn’s transit through Aquarius from 2023 brought financial stress and ownership changes, with Reliance Broadcast Network, owner of BIG FM, entering insolvency proceedings in India and Audacy filing for Chapter 11 in the United States. After Saturn moved into Pisces in 2025, a sign associated with endings and dissolution, the trend became more visible: licences were surrendered, stations went silent and networks consolidated. In India, HT Media shut Radio Nasha in Mumbai, Radio One in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, and Fever FM in Chennai in June 2026, while similar pressures in the United States and Britain have resulted in station closures, bankruptcies, consolidation and reductions in programming. Yet radio itself is far from disappearing. India still had 390 operational private FM stations across 120 cities in March 2026, with expansion continuing in some smaller markets even as stations closed in major cities. The pattern therefore appears less like the decline of radio than a Saturnian restructuring of an established medium, with weaker or less sustainable operations disappearing or consolidating as the industry adapts to changing audiences, economics and competition from digital media. There is a striking historical symmetry here: radio, the disruptive new advertising network of the Saturn cycle of the 1930s, is itself being tested as another technological transformation unfolds nearly a century later.

 While Pisces has coincided with dissolution and consolidation in parts of the older media landscape, the same transit has been accompanied by extraordinary experimentation in the new one. AI-generated images, video, voices and entire advertising campaigns have become increasingly sophisticated. The connection with Venus is especially interesting because advertising depends heavily on Venusian qualities: beauty, aesthetics, attraction, glamour, pleasure and desire.

 Across the history we have traced, the progression is revealing. Radio allowed commercial messages to merge with entertainment. Colour television expanded the visual possibilities of advertising. Satellite television multiplied channels and fragmented audiences. The internet made advertisements interactive and measurable. Smartphones brought media, communication and commerce together on a device carried everywhere. AI is now making the advertisement itself dynamic and generative.

 Pisces represents imagination, imagery, illusion and the dissolution of boundaries. AI is now dissolving some of the most fundamental boundaries in visual communication. A model in an advertisement need never have existed. A tropical island need never have been visited. A car can travel through an imaginary city. A celebrity can potentially speak languages he or she does not know while retaining the same voice.

 An advertisement that once required a photographer, director, models, stylists, locations, lighting crews and post-production specialists may increasingly be produced by a much smaller team. The internet dramatically reduced the cost of distribution and measurement. The smartphone made digital access continuous and ubiquitous. Artificial Intelligence is now beginning to reduce the cost of creation and production.

 Each technological shift has also changed the advertising agency itself. Radio drew agencies beyond creating advertisements and into developing and producing sponsored programmes. Television made production more elaborate, expanding the importance of directors, filmmakers, art directors and other specialists. Cable and satellite television multiplied media choices, while the internet brought new disciplines such as digital strategy, search, performance marketing, data analytics and programmatic media into the industry. Social media added community management, content creation and influencer marketing. AI could reverse part of this expansion by allowing smaller teams to perform tasks that once required numerous specialists, even as it creates entirely new roles. The history of advertising is therefore also a history of agencies repeatedly reorganising themselves around the capabilities of new media and technologies.

 For agencies, this presents both a threat and an opportunity. Routine execution may become cheaper. Small AI-enabled agencies may be able to produce work that once required much larger organisations. Companies may bring more advertising functions in-house. At the same time, strategy, judgment and an understanding of human behaviour could become considerably more valuable.

 AI may also take personalisation much further. For most of television history, millions of people saw essentially the same commercial. Digital advertising allowed different groups to see different advertisements. AI could eventually enable different individuals to see different versions of the same campaign. The setting, model, language, music, offer, product benefit and humour could all change according to the person viewing it.

 A campaign may cease to be one finished advertisement and become a creative system capable of generating thousands or even millions of variations. The boundary between the photographed and the generated is already dissolving, as is the distinction between real and synthetic models, original and cloned voices and, increasingly, human and machine creativity.

 Saturn, however, rarely brings transformation without tests. Copyright, employment, disclosure, privacy, deepfakes and authenticity will become increasingly important issues. If an advertisement features a synthetic person, should consumers be told? Who owns an AI-generated image? How should actors and celebrities protect their likenesses and voices? How far should advertisers be permitted to use behavioural information to personalise persuasive messages?

Every advertising revolution eventually creates its own regulatory reaction. The rise of radio and hard-sell advertising intensified concerns about deceptive claims. Television raised questions about advertising’s cultural influence. Digital advertising produced enormous debates about tracking and personal data. AI will inevitably create its own rules.

An even more fundamental transformation may lie ahead. Advertising has historically been designed to persuade human beings, but consumers are increasingly asking AI systems which television to buy, which hotel to book, which insurance policy to choose or which laptop best suits their needs.

As AI assistants become more capable, people may delegate more purchasing decisions to them. Eventually an AI agent may not merely recommend a product but purchase it.

For the first time in advertising history, the immediate target of persuasion may not always be human.

Brands could find themselves communicating simultaneously with people and machines. A beautiful commercial might persuade a person. An AI shopping agent may give greater weight to price, specifications, reviews, availability, reliability and what it already knows about its user. One audience responds to emotion, aspiration, beauty and humour; the other may respond more strongly to information and measurable value.

A new discipline could therefore emerge around making products and brands legible and attractive to AI recommendation and purchasing systems, much as search-engine optimisation developed when search engines became gateways to the internet. This could ultimately prove more consequential than simply using AI to make advertisements faster and more cheaply.

AI also creates an interesting paradox. If competent advertising becomes available to everyone, polished execution alone becomes less valuable. Attractive images will become plentiful, professional-looking videos easier to produce and reasonably good copy inexpensive. As execution becomes cheaper and more widely available, the genuinely scarce commodity may increasingly be the original idea.

This takes advertising back to one of the central lessons of the Creative Revolution. Bill Bernbach did not become influential because he possessed technology unavailable to his competitors. His advertising stood out because it thought differently.

AI may therefore devalue routine creativity while increasing the value of exceptional creativity. When almost everyone can produce something polished, originality matters more.

Across three Saturn cycles, the sequence is remarkably similar. Aquarius changes the technology, network or structure through which advertising operates. Pisces expands its creative possibilities. The technologies have changed, from radio and colour television to satellite networks and the internet, and now to generative AI, but the pattern of disruption followed by creative adaptation has repeatedly resurfaced.

The next transition is approaching.

Saturn is set to enter Aries in 2027. As the first sign of the zodiac, Aries represents beginnings, initiative and enterprise, and its arrival could mark another phase in advertising’s evolution.

The historical parallel with 1939 is particularly striking. Saturn’s previous movement into Aries followed a period in which radio had evolved from a relatively new technology into an established advertising system. The coming transit may similarly coincide with AI moving beyond experimentation as businesses begin building more permanent structures around it.

This could accelerate the emergence of new structures around AI. New AI-native agencies may emerge, along with new advertising formats, creative roles, professions and business models. Some existing structures may disappear, while others adapt to incorporate AI more extensively. The distinctions between advertising agencies, production houses, technology companies, data businesses and media companies are also likely to become less clear.

For all the technological upheavals advertising has experienced, however, its underlying purpose has changed surprisingly little. People continue to seek status, security, convenience, beauty, belonging, pleasure, recognition and a better life. Advertising has appealed to these desires through newspapers, radio programmes, colour television, satellite channels, websites, smartphones and, increasingly, algorithms.

Memorable advertising has never depended on technology alone. The medium may determine how a message reaches people and what can be done creatively, but the work that endures usually succeeds because it understands something about human behaviour, aspiration or the culture of its time. Technology can provide new tools and possibilities; it cannot guarantee an idea worth remembering.

AI may give advertisers capabilities that would have seemed unimaginable even a few years ago, but it does not eliminate the need for insight, judgment and originality. If anything, an age in which almost anyone can produce polished images, videos and copy may make genuinely distinctive ideas more valuable.

Advertising has repeatedly adapted to new technologies without losing its essential dependence on human understanding. AI will be another profound transformation, perhaps one of the largest the industry has experienced. But whatever form advertising takes in the years ahead, its oldest challenge will remain its most important one: understanding people well enough to create an idea that makes them pay attention.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com.