The Launch Campaign of Bagley’s Hesperidina (1864). Discovering Advertising in Buenos Aires Newspapers

So many times retold, the story of the launch campaign of Bagley’s Hesperidina, from October to December 1864, still remains misknown. This article intends to retrieve that early (but not single) episode from the history of advertising in Buenos Aires, where the leading newspapers (El Nacional, La Tribuna, Nación Argentina) were beginning to acknowledge “the importance of the ads”. P. T. Barnum and Thomas Holloway were already international celebrities. However, there were just a few large advertisers in the Río de la Plata. Among them were the main newspapers, which holded a quasi-monopoly in the emerging advertising field.