What is Advertising?

Giant 6x3 video screen ad display courtesy of East Texas Marketing Solutions (ETMS) where the professionals have more than 20 years combined experience in marketing, sales promotion and advertising, Target, Diversify, Enhance. ADVERTISING is mass media content intended to persuade audiences of readers, viewers or listeners to take action on products, services and ideas. 

The idea is to drive consumer behavior in a particular way in regard to a product, service or concept. 

Definition of advertising 

There is not a single generally accepted definition of advertising. 

Instead, there are several ways to define it. In summary:

Advertising is the paid, impersonal, one-way marketing of persuasive information from an identified sponsor disseminated through channels of mass communication to promote the adoption of goods, services or ideas.

Any mass medium can deliver advertising. Some random examples:

newspapers, magazines, radio and television broadcasts, films, stage shows, websites,

billboards, posters, wall paintings, town criers, human billboards, flyers, rack cards,

the back of event tickets, elastic bands on disposable diapers, bathroom stall doors,

cars, taxicabs, buses, trains, subway platforms, bus stop benches, street furniture,

airplanes, in-flight seat-back trays, overhead bins, passenger screens, skywriting,

shopping carts, stickers on fruit in supermarkets, supermarket receipts, coffee cups,

mobile phone screens, opening billboards in streaming audio and video.

How is advertising different from public relations? 

One simple answer is the advertiser has full control of the message all the way to the audience while the public relations professional has control only until the message is released to media gatekeepers who make decisions about whether to pass it on to the audience and in what form. 

Some lingo

Truck ad courtesy of Toxel

• Advertisers want to generate increased consumption of their commercial products and services.
   
• Advertising messages are media content paid for bysponsors.
   
• Sponsors finance the production of advertisements and buy space for them in print media or online, or time for them to be broadcast in radio or television programs.
   
• An advertisement is a paid announcement. For example, a persuasive message selling a product.
   
• Advertisements are placed in traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, television, radio and outdoor signs, and in new media such as websites, text messages and social media. Placing is the buying of specific space in print and online or time on the air. Placement is where the ad is positioned in a medium.
   
• Branding involves the frequent repetition of a product's name or image in an attempt to have the desirable qualities of that product stick in the minds of consumers.
   
• An Infomercial is a long television commercial of five minutes to an hour in length designed to create an immediate impulse purchase.
   
  Advertising agencies
   
• An advertising agency is a service business that helps client businesses sell goods and services by producing and placing advertisements.
   
• A client is a customer who buys and receives services, help and advice from an advertising professional. Ad agency clients include businesses and corporations, non-profit organizations, educational institutions, government agencies and others.
   
• Non-commercial advertisers, such as charities, political parties, interest groups, religious organizations, governmental agencies and other non-profits, also use advertising to sell their causes and services.
   
• Non-profit or not-for-profit organizations are agencies, institutions or organizations that are not commercially motivated and have no interest in profit. They rely sometimes on paid advertising and most heavily on free messaging, such as a public service announcements, which are not considered to be advertising.
   
• Free media is persuasive information produced by advertising and public relations professionals for publicity purposes and placed in mass media at no cost to the originator. Such PR messaging is not advertising. While there may be production costs, the advertising or public relations professional and the client do not pay a fee for placement of their publicity information in media.
   
• An integrated media campaign combines paid advertising with free media. These also are referred to as integrated marketing communications.
   
  Advertising media
   
• Newspaper and magazine advertising return money for space on their pages. An ad placement can cost from a few dollars for a small display ad in a newspaper up to more than $100,000 for a full page 4-color ad in a magazine. That doesn't include the cost of producing the ad.
   
• Radio and television advertising return money for time on their air. An ad placement can cost from a few dollars for a few seconds on the air at a local radio station up to nearly $3 million for 30 seconds in the Super Bowl telecast. That doesn't include the cost of producing the ad.
   
• Online advertising sells products and services at websites with banner ads, contextual ads, email marketing, spam, social networking couponing, etc. Couponing is the collection of coupons from websites to buy brand-name products at low cost. Banner adson a website could cost $25 a month or less and up to several hundred dollars a month depending on the traffic passing through the site. Traffic is the number of visitors in a period time and the number of pages on the site they visit.
   
• Classified ads are small messages in newspapers, magazines and online grouped together under content listings. Generally, they are the most inexpensive way to advertise.
   
• In-store advertising appears beside product displays and at check-out lines to catch a shopper's eye and promote a purchase.
   
• Billboard advertising is outdoor advertising on large signs that can be seen at a distance.
   
• Global advertising refers to a worldwide advertising campaign to build a brand internationally while speaking with one voice.
   
  Advertising elements
   
• Copy is the text printed or words spoken in an advertisement. Copywriting is the creating and arranging of words for an advertisement.
   
• Artwork includes the Illustrations, photographs, paintings, drawings, graphs and other non-text artistic works prepared for an advertisement.
   
• An ad layout is a rough draft or sketch that shows the general arrangement and appearance plan for a finished advertisement.
   
• Slogans are memorable phrases used in advertising campaigns. The ad agency N.W. Ayer & Son coined some of the best known advertising slogans in history:
   
  
  • When it rains it pours   Morton Salt, 1912
  • I'd walk a mile for a Camel   R.J. Reynolds, 1921
  • A diamond is forever   De Beers, 1947
  • Reach out and touch someone   AT&T, 1979
  • Be all you can be   United States Army, 1981