Advertising is a paid form of persuasive communication that uses mass and interactive media to reach broad audiences in order to connect an identified sponsor with buyers (a target audience), provide information about products (goods, services, and ideas), and interpret the product features in terms of the customer’s needs and wants.
Advertising is usually paid for by the advertiser (e.g., P&G) who has a product to sell (Old Spice), although some forms of advertising, such as public service announcements, use donate and time. Not only is the message paid for, but the sponsor is identified. Advertising began as one-way communication—from an advertiser to a targeted audience. Digital, interactive media, however, have opened the door to interesting new forms of two-way and multiple-way brand-related communication, such as word-of-mouth conversations among friends or consumer-generated messages sent to a company.
Advertising generally reaches a broad audience of potential customers, either as a mass audience or in smaller targeted groups. However, direct-response advertising, particularly those practices that involve digital communication, has the ability to address individual members of the audience. So some advertising can deliver one-to-one communication but with a large group of people.
In traditional advertising, the message is conveyed through different kinds of mass media, which are largely non-personal messages. This non-personal characteristic, however, is changing with the introduction of more interactive types of media, as the Old Spice case demonstrates with its social media that created a great deal of buzz. Richard Edelman, chief executive officer (CEO) of the Edelman agency, emphasizes the emerging importance of word of mouth, which is personal communication through new media forms rather than what he describes as “scripted messages in a paid format.”1 In other words, the communication pattern is not just from a business to a consumer, which we sometimes describe in marketing shorthand as “B to C,” but it can also be business to consumer to consumer, or “B to C to C,” which recognizes the important role of personal communication—word of mouth—about a product or even an advertisement.
Most advertising has a defined strategy and seeks to inform consumers and/or make them aware of a brand, company, or organization. In many cases, it also tries to persuade or influence consumers to do something, such as buy a product or check out a brand’s website. Persuasion may involve emotional messages as well as information. The Old Spice strategy was designed to recognize the negative messages associated with the brand’s old image in order to turn the image around and make it cool for today’s audience.
Keep in mind that, as we have said, a product can be a good, a service, or an idea. Some nonprofits, for example, use ads to “sell” memberships, inform about a cause and its need for donations and volunteers, or advocate on behalf of a position or point of view.
Advertising’s Basic Functions
To better understand advertising’s development as a commercial form of communication, it helps to see how advertising’s definition has evolved over the years in terms of three critical functions.
- Identification Advertising identifies a product and/or the store where it’s sold. In its earliest years, and this goes back as far as ancient times, advertising focused on identifying a product and where you could buy it. Some of the earliest ads were simply signs with the name or graphic image of the type of store—cobbler, grocer, or blacksmith.
- Information Advertising provides information about a product. Advances in printing technology at the beginning of the Renaissance spurred literacy and brought an explosion of printed materials in the form of posters, handbills, and newspapers. Literacy was no longer the badge of the elite, and it was possible to reach a general audience with more detailed information about products. The word advertisement first appeared around 1655, and by 1660, publishers were using the word as a heading in newspapers for commercial information. These messages announced land for sale, runaways (slaves and servants), transportation (ships arriving, stagecoach schedules), and goods for sale from local merchants. Because of the importance of commercial information, these ads were considered news and in many cases occupied more space in early newspapers than the news stories.
- Persuasion Advertising may persuade people to buy things. The Industrial Revolution accelerated social change as well as mass production. It brought the efficiency of machinery not only to the production of goods but also to their distribution. Efficient production plus wider distribution meant manufacturers could offer more products than their local markets could consume. With the development of trains and national roads, manufacturers could move their products around the country. For widespread marketing of products, it became important to have a recognizable brand name, such as Ivory or, more recently, Old Spice. Also, large groups of people needed to know about these goods, so along with industrial mechanization and the opening of the frontier came even more use of new communication media, such as magazines, catalogs, and billboards that reached more people with more enticing forms of persuasion. P. T. Barnum and patent medicine makers were among the advertising pioneers who moved promotion from identification and information to a flamboyant version of persuasion called hype—graphics and language characterized by exaggeration, or hyperbole.
Figure 1
1) Strategy: The logic or strategy behind an advertisement or any type of marketing communication message is stated in measurable objectives that focus on areas such as sales, news, psychological appeals, emotion, branding, and brand reputation, as well as the position and differentiation of the product from the competition and segmenting and targeting the best prospects.
2) Message: The concept behind a message and how that message is expressed is based on research and consumer insights with an emphasis on creativity and artistry.
3) Media: Various media have been used by advertisers over the centuries including print (handbills, newspapers, and magazines), outdoor (signs and posters), broadcast (radio and television), and now digital media. Targeting ads to prospective buyers is done by matching their profiles to media audiences. Advertising agency compensation was originally based on the cost of buying time or space in the media.
4) Evaluation: Effectiveness means meeting the stated objectives, and in order to determine if that has happened, there must be evaluation methods planned into the strategy. Standards also are set by professional organizations and companies that rate the size and makeup of media audiences as well as advertising’s social responsibility.
Common Types of Advertising
Advertising is not only a large industry but also a varied one. Different types of advertising have different roles. Considering all the different advertising situations, we can identify eight major types of advertising:
- Brand advertising, the most visible type of advertising, is referred to as national or consumer advertising.
- Retail advertising or local advertising focuses on retailers, distributors, or dealers who sell their merchandise in a certain geographical area; retail advertising has information about products that are available in local stores. The objectives focus on stimulating store traffic and creating a distinctive image for the retailer. Local advertising can refer to a retailer, such as T. J. Maxx; a service provider, such as KFC; or a manufacturer or distributor who offers products in a fairly restricted geographic area.
- Direct-response advertising tries to stimulate an immediate response by the customer to the seller. It can use any advertising medium, particularly direct mail and the Internet. The consumer can respond by telephone, by mail, or over the Internet, and the product is delivered directly to the consumer by mail or some other carrier.
- Business-to-business (B2B) advertising, also called trade advertising, is sent from one business to another. It includes messages directed at companies distributing products as well as industrial purchasers and professionals, such as lawyers and physicians. Advertisers place most business advertising in professional publications that reach these audiences.
- Institutional advertising, also called corporate advertising, focuses on establishing a corporate identity or winning the public over to the organization’s point of view. Tobacco companies, for example, run ads that focus on the positive things they are doing. The ads for a pharmaceutical company showcasing leukemia treatment also adopt that focus.
- Nonprofit advertising is used by not-for-profit organizations, such as charities, foundations, associations, hospitals, orchestras, museums, and religious institutions, to reach customers (e.g., hospitals), members (the Sierra Club), and volunteers (Red Cross). It is also used to solicit donations and other forms of program participation. The “truth” campaign for the American Legacy Foundation, which tries to reach teenagers with antismoking messages, is an example of nonprofit advertising.
- Public service advertising provides messages on behalf of a good cause, such as stopping drunk driving (as in ads from Mothers Against Drunk Driving) or preventing child abuse. Also called public service announcements, advertising and public relations professionals usually create them pro bono (free of charge), and the media donate the space and time.
- Specific advertising areas, such as health care, green marketing, agribusiness, and inter- national, address specific situations or issues and have developed specialized advertising techniques and agencies.
The Role of Advertising Agencies
The advertising agency (or other types of marketing communication agencies) creates, produces, and distributes the messages. The working arrangement between advertiser and agency is known as the agency–client partnership.
An advertiser uses an outside agency because it believes the agency will be more efficient in creating advertising messages than the advertiser would be on its own. Successful agencies such as Crispin Porter + Bogusky typically have strategic and creative expertise, media knowledge, workforce talent, and the ability to negotiate good deals for clients. The advertising professionals working for the agency are experts in their areas of specialization and passionate about their work. Not all advertising professionals work in agencies. Large advertisers, either companies or organizations, manage the advertising process either by setting up an advertising department (sometimes called marketing services) that oversees the work of agencies or by setting up their own in-house agency, as Figure 1 illustrates. Tasks performed by the company’s marketing services department include the following: set the budget and select the agencies; coordinate activities with vendors, such as media, production, and photography; make sure the work gets done as scheduled; and determine whether the work has achieved prescribed objectives.
Figure 2 – Two Advertising Organization Structures
Reference
Moriarty, S., Mitchell, N., & Wells, W. (2015). Advertising. In S. Moriarty, N. Mitchell, & W. Wells, Advertising and IMC Principles and Practices (10th ed., pp. 34-60). London, UK: Pearson Education.
