The advertising industry was one of 20th-century London's boom
industries. It brought new jobs for commercial artists,
printers, copywriters and- later in the century - film
directors. By the end of the century, London firms dominated the
national industry with over 80% of all British jobs in
advertising located in London. At the beginning of the century,
London's fledging advertising industry was in the hands of three
main firms: Mathers and Crowder, founded in 1850; T B Browne's,
founded in 1872; and S H Bensons, founded in 1893. The industry
expanded and changed in the 1920s with the arrival of new,
large-scale American agencies such as J Walter Thompson, which
opened its London office in 1926. The Americans brought a new
hardnosed approach to advertising, employing such 'scientific'
processes as market research. By the 1920s, London's advertising
district was Aldwych and Kingsway. The district was convenient
to Fleet Street, then the centre of the newspaper industry that
made up the agencies' major client