About: Crawford's Advertising Agency

Crawford's Advertising Agency, formally WS Crawford Ltd, was one of the most important British advertising agencies of the first half of the 20th century. It was responsible for introducing a highly visual style more influenced by European artistic movements such as modernism and futurism than by traditional American marketing techniques. The agency owed its success largely to two men, its founder Sir William Crawford and the legendary art director Ashley Havinden. Between them they exerted an enormous influence on British advertising from the early 1920s until the end of the 1950s.