The old ads were incredibly verbose as well. In fact, if you compare ads in say, 1955 National Geographics to ads in 1985 Byte, theyre not so different: headline, image, then 200 words of content. Something happened in advertising around 1988 to 1990 that totally upended this approach. (I wonder if it was the arrival of mature DTP that meant that much more visual layouts could be achieved for the same effort?)