Assignment 2 - Essay or Report

Write an essay around 800 words based on the topic " ADVERTISING ".

ADVERTISING

The present world is filled with advertisements. However, does one know what an advertisement is? According to Wikipedia, advertise is a form of communication intended to persuade the viewers, readers, or listeners to take some action accordingly. Another name for advertising is marketing. It has to deal with everything about price, product, research, strategy and overall management.

Advertisement is not something that is new. There has been sign of advertisement existing since 550 BC. In Louver, there is a 550 BC painting that talks about buying. Wall rock advertising was common in Africa and Asia as well as South America. In ruins of ancient Arabia commercial and political messages have been found. Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome used papyrus to advertise products and ideas. 15^th and 16^thcenturies was the Printing Age, in that time advertising began to take on its true colors, mainly in the form of handbills. In the 17th century it made its presence felt in the newspapers. From the 19th century advertising began to march hand in hand with economic growth. Mail-order advertising made its appearance. In 1841 the first advertising agency by Volney Palmer was set up in Boston. N.W. Ayer & Son were the first full-fledged advertising agency that started operating from Philadelphia in 1875. From 1920 radio stations began functioning and soon became advertising mediums. Television joined in from the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. From the 1960’s a new trend was seen. Advertising had become an art. It became creative and called out to the best talents.

Modern advertising had developed with the rise of mass production in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Mass media is defined as any media meant to reach a mass amount of people. Different types of media are used to deliver these messages. Since women do make most of the purchasing soon the female sex became the target object. Today it has reached the height where the debate rages about what should or should not be allowed. Branding also became a factor when dangerous unlicensed products came to be advertised.

There are sorts of medium that are being used to advertise, the traditional one such as printed advertising, advertising media, direct mailing and the new ones such as websites and text messages. TV is one of the most powerful advertising medium because of its nature that can contain and present very detailed information about a product. Printed Advertising is method that is cheaper than the TV spot. However unlike the TV, printed ads could only attract the eye of the reader only. Thus, when this method is used, a few factors are need to be noticed. Firstly is that, only use the right-hand pages for newspaper ads. This is because normally. People’s first eye sight would be on the right side. Secondly would be the color. Because that newspaper ads could only attract the reader’s eyes , thus color play an important role here. For example, Red signals means danger and colors fo the dusk make people feel comfortable. The layout and the text are also very important parts of newspaper adverts. The layout may take the readers look at the main information, and the text is just to inform interested people. Direct mailing is another form of advertising. The companies get a list of names and address and send leaflets to those people who might be interested in their products. Some people find this direct mailing irritating, wasteful and unsightly, so the leaflets land in the rubbish bin.

Each advertising medium serves a different purpose. For examples, radio commercials get millions of teenagers to shop for products made exclusively for them. Magazine ads showing models dressed in the latest style persuade women and men to buy new clothes in order to remain fashionable. In developing advertising strategies, markets must consider the best advertising medium of their message. Take television and printed ads as an example, televisions advertisement is being uses by marketers to keep the product’s name fresh in consumers’ minds. You might have noticed that how well u can remember slogans long after the spot is over. In the other hand newspaper and magazine ads were used to educate consumers on the product’s abilities and trade publications to introduce new software.

However, does advertisement necessary? Is advertisement benefiting the consumer or causing the consumer to spend more? There are always two sides to the coin. If there is pro then certainly there will be cons. There had been debates saying that advertising persuade people to buy things they don’t need and to be wasteful. However, some advertisement is essential, in absence of the ads, consumers would be unaware of goods and services that are available and it might lead to the result of the consumer’s choices being restricted. Advertisement is also necessary as a way to inform consumers of the availability features of new products as they become available. Economists refer to this advertising as informative advertising and its importance is seen in the fact that the government spends very large sums in this type of advertising. The existences of advertisement are also being said as creating the chances of job. Not to forget, advertising Advertising enables us to afford such “luxuries” like TV and newspapers, because without it, they would be considerably more expensive.

Regardless whether we like advertisements or not, advertisement had become indispensable in our economies. It has become a market of its own and it offers a high number of jobs. Moreover,advertisements are an important source of information for the public.

Prepared by Lim Pey Pey