Advertising, as the name implied, meant spreading the word far and wide.
Having been in business for so many years, Xia Lan Veloss naturally understood that.
Yet given Coriel's current stage of commercial development, so-called advertising amounted to little more than hanging up product signs and the goods themselves.
Since the general public's level of education was rather low, most signs relied primarily on pictures.
Individual craftsmen and merchants also often placed their own marks on the goods they made or sold, so that if an item needed to be returned or repaired after sale, they could tell whether it had been made or sold by them. These marks could be called the earliest prototypes of modern trademarks.
What was worth mentioning, however, was that the one who had expanded and elevated this trade was not Xia Lan Veloss, blessed with a keen nose for business, but that lord who had just been "forced to get lost"—Khelben Blackstaff Arunsun.
Decades ago, when Khelben had just taken office as a Masked Lord, he had wanted the Blackstaff Merchant Guild he had founded to rapidly gain scale and competitiveness. To that end, he had specifically tasked his former Harpers subordinate—the Moonstars—with organizing a verbal advertising group made up of fourteen bards, who hawked advertisements in the streets.
Naturally, this advertising group had received the "special approval" of Lord Ahghairon and enjoyed considerable prestige and public recognition.
These verbal advertising operators mainly signed contracts with shops and merchant guilds, promoting merchants aloud in the streets in exchange for payment.
When these verbal advertisers who made their living by hawking their wares advertised food and drink, the bards would write their advertising lines like poems and set them to lovely melodies to be sung aloud, making them immensely popular even to this day.
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