What Is Advertising?

ADVERTISING

As the English historian and essayist Thomas Macaulay wrote, "Advertising is to business what steam is to industry — the sole propelling power. Nothing except the Mint can make money without advertising." Almost without exception, Macau-lay's principle holds true for businesses today, and it is especially true for the mass media. Their solvency as businesses depends to a great extent on advertising, and advertising depends heavily on the mass media as its vehicle. It is impossible to imagine the American mass media without advertising, for they have grown up together and each depends on the other.

Advertising as communication

Advertising is not a mere appendage to the mass media. It has a structure and existence of its own, and it is an important part of the American economy. Moreover, as economic historian David Potter wrote, "Advertising now compares with such long-standing institutions as the school and the church in the magnitude of its social influence. It dominates the media, it has vast power in shaping popular standards, and it is really one of the very limited group of institutions which exercise social control."

But we should look at advertising not only as an economic and social force but also as a form of communication. A television commercial, a catchy slogan, a full-page spread in a magazine, a pencil with the name of a firm embossed on its side, a card above your seat on a bus or subway—all these are forms of advertising. What do they have in common? We begin our examination of advertising with a look at its definition, functions, content, and history.

What Is Advertising?

One definition suggests that advertising is simply "the action of attracting public attention to a product or business [as well as] the business of preparing and distributing advertisements." According to the American Marketing Associ­ation, advertising is "any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, and services by an identified sponsor."' But neither of these definitions notes the role of the mass media in advertising. To correct this deficiency, a leading advertising textbook defines advertising as "controlled, identifiable information and persuasion by means of mass communications media."⁴

Advertising is controlled in that it is prepared in accordance with the desires of the firm or other group it represents. Unlike a person who grants an interview to the press not knowing how his or her words will appear, the advertiser knows exactly what the message will say. Furthermore, advertising is identifiable communication. The message may be subtle or direct, but you know it is advertising and not, for example, news. Advertising can be entertaining, but few would claim that this is its primary goal. If advertising entertains, that is only a means to an end. The end is to increase sales. Advertising tries to inform consumers about a particular product and to persuade them to make a particular decision—usually, the decision to buy a product. Its avowed goal is to guide and control buying behavior, to move the consumer toward one product instead of another. Thus it is a form of social control, urging the consumer to conform within a range of product choices, "providing norms of behavior appropriate to current economic conditions."

We can also define advertising in terms of the meaning theory of mass communication's effects. It is an attempt to establish, extend, substitute, or stabilize people's meanings for symbols that label the advertiser's products or services. Advertisers seek to influence language conventions, individual interpretations, and the shared meanings of such symbols so that people will make choices that are favorable to the advertisers' purposes. In other words, they hope that through communication they can get people to know about, like, and purchase their wares.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1087