5 Big ideas about Advertising

1) Advertising is a type of communication that attempts to persuade individuals to take a form of action (buy, believe, consume) toward a product, idea or service. Advertising is literally everywhere you look, whether it be bus stops, billboards as your driving, billboards on buildings, newspapers, magazines and also the Internet. There are many different companies competing for fewer ad spaces which makes the person selling the space a very successful person. Contrary to the free P.R., ads cost money, and depending on how big the product, idea or service is determines how much money will be spent advertising it. At its best, advertising entertains and even educates us, while striving to alter our attitudes, beliefs and behavior to get us to buy and consume certain products, use particular services or form certain opinions.

2) Advertisements are trying to accomplish the same thing, to persuade us to accept a product's message or brand and to create a strong emotional relationship with it which is known as product affinity, even if the affinity is irrational. If the ad succeeds in doing this, the audience is more likely to alter its opinion and take action by buying the product. If an ad campaign creates cultural momentum, it will encourage larger segments of the target audience to feel they are part of the story, to believe that they belong to the "in-group" that has discovered the life-changing brand or product. Advertisers want their ads to make you develop loyalty to the products even if it is subconsciously. You may not think you are "programmed"to buying certain products but look at products around your house, my example is old spice men's deodorant. I saw the funny commercial once, bought the product now I buy it every time so their message got to me even though I don't feel I intentionally have product affinity to the product.

3) The biggest thing about ads is where people see them. Ad spaces in magazines in newspapers used to be the hot commodity in the media outlets because everyone read them. However with the shift of culture going away from print news to online news this has lead to more ads being put online. A big reason more companies switch to online ad space is because it is significantly cheaper and more accessible to the consumer.

4) As much as advertisers rely on consumers' desires or their sense of social responsibility to facilitate cultural change or to sell a product, they also rely on universal appeal. In this day and age, sex is one of the biggest appeals in today's ad market. Sexual imagery in advertising often pushes cultural limits by presenting evocative situations. Generally, the more sexually provocative an ad is, the more it appears to garner lasting audience attention. 40 years ago, the sex appeal aspect for advertisers wasn't even a vague idea because it was so against the grain, which shows how far culture has changed. The biggest job of the advertisers is to adjust and conform to the times, and the appeal of this day and age is clearly sex appeal.

5) Do to the changing landscape of the 21st century in a media sense, more and more advertisers have been moving away from audience broadcasting, which seeks the widest reach and the largest number of "eyes" or "ears" for an ad, to narrowcasting, which creates narrowly directed messages that are targeted to smaller, more clearly defined audience segments. Narrowcasting is foundational to marketing in the Digital Age because it heightens awareness of key needs in consumers, both real and felt, and provides marketers with important feedback that better gauges the relevancy and effectiveness of their advertising campaigns. Example that patron and jack daniels ads would not appear in woman's health because that's not the audience they are trying to sell to. Instead they would focus on men's magazines and websites.