Advertising

Advertising ADVERTISING a collective term for public announcements designed to promote the sale of specific products or services. Advertising is a form of mass selling employed when the use of direct, person-to-person selling is impractical, impossible, or simply inefficient. It is to be distinguished from other activities intended to persuade the public, such as propaganda, publicity, and public relations. Advertising techniques range in complexity from the publishing of simple notices in the classified-advertising columns of newspapers to integrated marketing communications, involving the concerted use of advertising in newspapers, magazines, television, and radio, as well as direct response, sales promotion, and other communications vehicles in the course of a single campaign. From its unsophisticated beginnings in ancient times, advertising has flourished into a worldwide industry. In the U.S. alone in the early 1990s, about $138 billion was spent in a single year on advertising to influence the purchase of products and services. Advertising falls into two main categories: consumer advertising, directed to the ultimate purchaser, and trade (or business-to-business) advertising, in which the appeal is made to business users through trade journals and other media. Both consumer and trade advertising employ many specialised types of commercial persuasion. A relatively minor, but important, advertising, television, newspapers, sales, buy, appeals, radio, products, media, direct, consumer, selling, direct-mail, designed, through, sometimes, services, research, public, motivational, mail, magazines, appeal, advertisements, advertising, trade, techniques, sale, publications, product, people, new, national, mail-order, local, institutional, industry, free, forms, form, example, door, communications, business, year, world, without, wide, un-mailed, two, three