The Advertising Industry

After studying this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Sketch the history of advertising in the United States

2. Describe various types of advertising agencies and how they differ

3. Analyze the process of producing and creating ads

4. Discuss branding and positioning and explain their importance to advertisers

5. Explain the debate between advertising's critics and defenders about the industry’s role in spreading commercialism and the decline of democratic participation

“The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.”

If you're like most people, you are probably aware that advertisers buy space or time in various media in order to send you messages (“advertisements”) about their products or services. You might know (perhaps because you’ve read previous chapters of this book) that where advertisers decide to place their money can make the difference between life and death for media firms. But even if you don’t know these things, it’s likely that you’ve talked with friends about ads. Maybe you’ve commented about how funny or how horrible they are, or how good looking the men or women in them are.

Advertising is the activity of explicitly paying for media space or time in order to direct favorable atten­tion to certain goods or services. Three points about this definition deserve emphasis. First, advertisers pay for the space or time that they receive. Second, advertising clearly states its presence. When you see an ad, you know what it is for, and you often know quite easily who is sponsoring it. Third, advertising involves persuasion—the ability or power to induce an indi­vidual or group of individuals to undertake a course of action or embrace a point of view by means of argu­ment, reasoning, or emotional plea.

The aim of this chapter is to help you critically explore the quick-changing business that is behind the ads and the support of such a large part of the media. The next chapter will tackle public relations and marketing communication and examine the important links both have to advertising. Let’s start by getting a sense of how the ad industry came into existence.

The Rise of the Advertising Industry

advertising agency a company that specializes in the creation of ads for placement in media that accept payment for exhibiting those ads

brand a name and image associated with a particular product

ad campaign a carefully considered approach to creating and circulating messages about a product over a specific period with particular goals in mind

Audit Bureau of Circulation an independent organization established in 1914 by advertising agencies to verify the size of a periodical’s audience

reason-why ads advertisements that list the benefits of a product in ways that would move the consumer to purchase it

Image ads advertisements that tie the product to a set of positive feelings

Advertising is as old as selling itself. During the time of the ancient Roman Empire, criers were paid to scream out messages about products for sale. There were “print” ads, too: archeologists have found a 3,000-year-old ad—written on papyrus—for a runaway slave in Thebes. In medieval England, shopkeepers often posted a boy or man at the entrance to their shops to shout at the top of his lungs about the goods in the store. Signs posted over shops also beckoned consumers. After the advent of the printing press several centuries later, businesses added handbills and newspapers to their advertising mix. This routine presence of advertising was transferred to the British colonies in the New World. By the time Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, advertisements were an expected and accepted part of almost all the day’s periodicals.

Franklin was one of the most successful sellers and writers of advertisements in the American colonies. Like our modern-day ads, the ads of Franklin’s era shouted messages for goods, for houses for sale, for articles lost or stolen, for plays showing in local theaters, and for patented medicines. Because the colonial printing press could accommodate only the simplest drawings, ads looked more like today’s stodgy classified ads than like any of the more trendy advertisements in contemporary media. Then, as now, some advertisements stirred anger and controversy. (An ad in one of Franklin’s papers, for example, was accused of inciting anti-Catholic feelings.) And then, as now, intellectuals worried about the power of shrewdly worded messages to stir people to purchase too much and believe outrageous things.

From its earliest days through the 1840s, advertising involved direct negotiations between someone who wanted to advertise a product and the owner of a newspa­per or magazine. Say you were the owner of a dry-goods store and you wanted to announce a new shipment of fabric. You would write the announcement yourself, and then visit the local newspaper office and pay for the space to make an announce­ment of your goods.

That system worked fine when only one or two newspapers were available and merchants wanted to sell goods in a relatively small area. But imagine the difficulty of buying announcements in a much greater number of papers. Say you are the pro­ducer of a horse buggy in 1840. You have heard about all the new penny-press papers that have attracted large audiences from Boston, Massachusetts, to Richmond, Virginia. Advertising your buggy in these papers would seem to be a good idea, but how can you negotiate efficiently with all of them? Sure, you could write letters, but such one-on-one correspondence with every paper would be terribly time-consuming.