What Is Advertising?

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In 1990 alone, 13,300 new products were introduced. Of these, 74 percent were food products. What we knew of them was the by-product of some form of advertising. In 1998, more than $200 billion was spent on U.S. advertising, an increase of 7.5 percent over expenditures in 1997. The rate of increase is important because the growth in advertising expenses outpaced the growth of the U.S. gross domestic product, which was 4.9 percent.

When the woman who edits this book for Wadsworth sits down at her nationally advertised computer, she wears clothes advertised both by local retailers and through national ad campaigns. We have never seen her office, but we would bet that the paint on the walls, the desk on which the computer rests, the Tag Heuer Carrera Replica(http://www.imitatewatch.com/GoodsSeries/Replica-Carrera-Watches-383.html) lamp on the desk, and the pens in the drawer are as familiar to us as they are to you, although we may live thousands of miles apart. All these products probably have been nationally advertised. This form of standardization in our lives is in part the by-product of global advertising, a process ...
... that is expensive. In spring 1999, for example, a one-time full-page ad in Reader's Digest cost $530,907; in Time, $343,850; and in the Wall Street Journal, $205,661.

In a sense, advertising through the mass media has given us a world in common. You are familiar with the products we purchase, we are familiar with the products you purchase, and that familiarity transcends large geographic distances. In other words, we live in a world filled with advertised products; often the presence of one of these products rather than another in our lives is determined by the effectiveness of the ad campaigns for competing products.

In this chapter we examine what advertising is and what advertising through the mass media does.

The Romans identified three goals of rhetoric: to teach, to delight, and to move to action. Of course, these goals rarely occur in complete isolation from one another. As we argued in our discussion of news, the process of choosing a topic, narrowing it, and selecting evidence in its support gives all messages a persuasive component.

Taken at face value, news professes to inform or teach, and ads profess to move to action, to advocate one purchasing decision rather than another. By contrast, most prime-time programming (sitcoms, crime shows) professes to delight.

In contrast to news or other types of programming, advertising is more likely to have a goal of explicit action. Here ads are more akin to editorials, which urge active response, than to the other sorts of content surrounding Breitling Replica(http://www.luv-replica.com/GoodsBrand/Breitling_Replica_Watches-4.html) them. An ad asks us to go somewhere, do something, try something, buy something, accept some single idea, add a new word—generally a product's trade name—to our vocabulary, and associate positive images with that word. To accomplish any of these objectives, the ad contains a simple, highly repetitious message. In general terms, then, we can sort the ad from its surrounding content by its simplicity, by its redundancy, and by the clarity with which it urges adoption, choice, or action.