Advertising

 

Advertising is providing information, calling attention to, and making known something that you want to sell or promote. Advertising is a message designed to promote or sell a product, a service, or an idea. Advertising reaches people through varied types of mass communication. In everyday life, people come into contact with many different kinds of advertising. Printed ads are found in newspapers and magazines. Poster ads are placed in buses, subways, and trains. Neon signs are scattered along downtown streets. Billboards dot the landscape along our highways. Commercials interrupt radio and television programming.

WHAT IS ADVERTISING?

Advertising is a non-personal form of promotion that is delivered through selected media outlets that, under most circumstances, require the marketer to pay for message placement. Advertising has long been viewed as a method of mass promotion in that a single message can reach a large number of people. But, this mass promotion approach presents problems since many exposed to an advertising message may not be within the marketer’s target market, and thus, may be an inefficient use of promotional funds. However, this is changing as new advertising technologies and the emergence of new media outlets offer more options for targeted advertising.

Advertising is a form of communication intended to persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to purchase or take some action upon products, ideas, or services. It includes the name of a product or service and how that product or service could benefit the consumer, to persuade a target market to purchase or to consume that particular brand. These messages are usually paid for by sponsors and viewed via various media. Advertising can also serve to communicate an idea to a large number of people in an attempt to convince them to take a certain action.

HISTORY OF ADVERTISING

As we have seen, an advertisement can be very simple, and simple advertising, e.g for events, has been around for a long as people have been trying to make money out of attracting a wider public. Posters announcing an event were probably the first form of advertising, and these date back to gladiatorial contests in Ancient Rome.

Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages and wall posters. Commercial messages and political campaign displays have been found in the ruins of Pompeii and ancient Arabia. Lost and found advertising on papyrus was common in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Wall or rock painting for commercial advertising is another manifestation of an ancient advertising form, which is present to this day in many parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. The tradition of wall painting can be traced back to Indian rock art paintings that date back to 4000 BC. History tells us that Out-of-home advertising and billboards are the oldest forms of advertising.

As the towns and cities of the Middle Ages began to grow, and the general populace was unable to read, signs that today would say cobbler, miller, tailor or blacksmith would use an image associated with their trade such as a boot, a suit, a hat, a clock, a diamond, a horse shoe, a candle or even a bag of flour. Fruits and vegetables were sold in the city square from the backs of carts and wagons and their proprietors used street callers (town criers) to announce their whereabouts for the convenience of the customers.

As education became an apparent need and reading, as well as printing, developed advertising expanded to include handbills. In the 17th century advertisements started to appear in weekly newspapers in England. These early print advertisements were used mainly to promote books and newspapers, which became increasingly affordable with advances in the printing press; and medicines, which were increasingly sought after as disease ravaged Europe. However, false advertising and so-called "quack" advertisements became a problem, which ushered in the regulation of advertising content. As the economy expanded during the 19th century, advertising grew alongside. In the United States, the success of this advertising format eventually led to the growth of mail-order advertising.

The nineteenth century saw the skills of the advertiser come to the forefront, as ads began to mix images and words, and adopt the techniques of language and layout that we are familiar with today. With the proliferation of goods and services in this century, it became recognized that advertising was an important part of business, and should be dealt with by experts in the field. Most of the advertising agencies that dominate the global markets today were founded in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

During the early part of the twentieth century, governments began to recognize the power of advertising to get their message across to their 'consumers' (ie their citizens). This was particularly apparent during the First World War, when advertising was used to enlist soldiers and enforce government policies. We look back at some of these advertisements now and think of them as blatant propaganda, or the deliberate spreading of ideas in order to further a cause. Many of these ads use techniques of psychological manipulation which now seem to us crude and unfair, deliberately setting out to frighten the target audience, or shame them into following instructions. These posters assume a very specific power relationship between advertiser and audience, and we notice that the advertiser assumes that they know best and are giving the audience information for their own good. A modern audience has a more sophisticated approach to advertising and is more sensitive to any attitudes which might be considered openly patronizing. How do you think a modern audience might respond to the poster on the right?

Advertising was a large, well established industry in 1914 and it continued to expand after the First World War. Psychology was growing in stature as a science during this period, and advertisers where quick to latch on to key ideas (the desire to 'belong', subconscious fears) in order to reach their audience. As new ways of reaching a mass audience became technologically available (cinema, radio) advertising was quick to latch on to new media and became an important way for broadcasters to help fund their programming. Radio was an especially successful way to reach audiences in the 1920s - between 1923 and 1930 60% of American families acquired a radio set. The term 'soap opera' as we know it came into being as soap manufacturers sponsored domestic radio dramas in return for frequent plugs for their product. Listen to some 1920s radio advertising here.

As the 1960s began, the networks wanted more control over the content and style of programming, and as TV became more sophisticated and production costs rose, single sponsors began to struggle. NBC executive Sylvester Weaver came up with the idea of selling not whole shows to advertisers, but separate, small blocks of broadcast time. Several different advertisers could buy time within one show, and therefore the content of the show would move out of the control of a single advertiser - rather like a print magazine. This became known as the magazine concept, or participation advertising, as it allowed a whole variety of advertisers to access the audience of a single TV show. Thus the 'commercial break' as we know it was born.