I lean towards the "people have been people since there were people" side of the debate and assume there has been marketing since at least the invention of agriculture and its resultant ability to allow humans to make a living doing something other than calorie acquisition.
Interesting, I wonder if it would be pedantic in construing modern marketing being drastically different than marketing pre 1800s? It doesn't seem fair to to me to classify a shopkeep from antiquity shouting they have the best wine in a bazaar to be equivalent to a marketing job in Meta.
But the examples in your wiki page show just that, really neat stuff. Thanks for sharing.
If you make marketing pre-1800s, with people branding their widely distributed amphorae, making ads and so on as drastically different than modern techniques, you'd have to also consider engineering drastically different. Also, the idea of surviving a visit to the doctor is a pretty novel modern concept.
This suggests you may be off by a few millenia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_marketing
I lean towards the "people have been people since there were people" side of the debate and assume there has been marketing since at least the invention of agriculture and its resultant ability to allow humans to make a living doing something other than calorie acquisition.