JWT is the world’s best-known marketing communications brand, and a true global network, with more than 200 offices in over 90 countries employing nearly 10,000 marketing professionals. Founded in New York in 1864 as Carlton and Smith, an advertising broker buying and selling space in the popular religious journals of the nineteenth century, the firm was purchased and renamed by James Walter Thompson in 1878. Under Thompson's leadership the Company expanded its operations to include the placing of advertisements inwomen's magazines, an innovation to which the young business owed much of its success. As early as the 1890s the Company established branch offices in Boston, Chicago, and London. It began to create advertisements and to aid clients in the development of trademarks and package designs.