Promotion Methods

Promoters bring crowds through a variety of methods. The most direct are guerrilla marketing techniques such as plastering posters on outdoor walls, flyposting, and distributing handbills on windows of cars parked in entertainment districts. Promoters also keep mailing lists, emails, SMS and MMS messages.

Publicity

Publicity is the deliberate attempt to manage the public's perception of a subject. The subjects of publicity include people (for example, politicians and performing artists), goods and services, organizations of all kinds, and works of art or entertainment.

Publicity methods include:

• contest;

• event sponsorship;

• analysis or prediction;

• poll or survey;

• invention and presentation of an award.

The advantages of publicity are low cost, and credibility (particularly if the publicity is aired in between news stories like on evening TV news casts). New technologies such as weblogs, web cameras, web affiliates, and convergence (phone-camera posting of pictures and videos to websites) are changing the cost-structure.

Advertising

Advertising is a form of communication that typically attempts to persuade potential customers to purchase or to consume more of a particular brand of product or service. Modern advertising developed with the rise of mass production in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Many advertisements are designed to generate increased consumption of products and services through the creation and reinvention of the "brand image". For these purposes, advertisements sometimes embed their persuasive message with factual information. Every major medium is used to deliver these messages, including television, radio, cinema, magazines, newspapers, video games, the Internet, carrier bags and billboards. Advertising is often placed by an advertising agency on behalf of a company or other organization.

Money spent on advertising has increased dramatically in recent years. In 2007, spending on advertising has been estimated at over $150 billion in the United States and $385 billion worldwide.

Types of advertising Media

Commercial advertising media can include wall paintings, billboards, street furniture components, printed flyers and rack cards, radio, cinema and television adverts, web banners, mobile telephone screens, web popups, skywriting, bus stop benches, human billboards, magazines, newspapers, town criers, sides of buses, banners attached to or sides of airplanes ("logojets"), in-flight advertisements on seatback tray tables or overhead storage bins, taxicab doors, roof mounts and passenger screens, musical stage shows, subway platforms and trains, etc. Any place an "identified" sponsor pays to deliver their message through a medium is advertising.

Mobile billboard advertising

Mobile billboards are truck- or blimp-mounted billboards or digital screens. These can be dedicated vehicles built solely for carrying advertisements along routes preselected by clients, or they can be specially-equipped cargo trucks. The billboards are often lighted; some being backlit, and others employing spotlights. Some billboard displays are static, while others change; for example, continuously or periodically rotating among a set of advertisements.

Covert advertising (product placement) occurs when a product or brand is embedded in entertainment and media. For example, in a film, the main character can travel by an airplane of a definite company.

The TV commercial is generally considered the most effective mass-market advertising format, as is reflected by the high prices TV networks charge for commercial airtime during popular TV events. The majority of television commercials feature a song or jingle that listeners soon relate to the product.