Verb

advertising

1. Present participle of advertise.

Noun

Singular advertising

Plural uncountable

advertising (uncountable)

1. communication whose purpose is to inform potential customers about products and services

Derived terms

• two-price advertising

Related terms

• advertisement

Advertising is a form of communication intended to persuade its viewers, readers or listeners to take some action. It usually includes the name of a product or service and how that product or service could benefit the consumer, to persuade potential customers to purchase or to consume that particular brand. Modern advertising developed with the rise of mass production in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Commercial advertisers often seek to generate increased consumption of their products or services through branding, which involves the repetition of an image or product name in an effort to associate related qualities with the brand in the minds of consumers. Different types of media can be used to deliver these messages, including traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, television, radio, outdoor or direct mail. Advertising may be placed by an advertising agency on behalf of a company or other organization.

Organizations that spend money on advertising promoting items other than a consumer product or service include political parties, interest groups, religious organizations and governmental agencies. Nonprofit organizations may rely on free modes of persuasion, such as a public service announcement.

Money spent on advertising has declined in recent years. In 2007, spending on advertising was estimated at more than $150 billion in the United States and $385 billion worldwide, and the latter to exceed $450 billion by 2010.

Advertising is paid communication through a non-personal medium in which the sponsor is identified and the message is controlled.

Sourced

Listed in chronological order.

• Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
  • Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889, Ch. 22

• You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
  • Norman Douglas, South Wind, 1917

• Living in age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.
  • J. B. Priestley, "The Disillusioned", 1929; in The Balconinny, and Other Essays, 1969, p. 30.

• It is never silent, it drowns out all other voices, and it suffers no rebuke, for is it not the voice of America? [...] It has taught us how to live, what to be afraid of, how to be beautiful, how to be loved, how to be envied, how to be successful. [...] Is it any wonder that the American population tends increasingly to speak, think, feel in terms of this jabberwocky? That the stimuli of art, science, religion are progressively expelled to the periphery of American life to become marginal values, cultivated by marginal people on marginal time?
  • James Rorty, Our Master's Voice: Advertising (New York: John Day, 1934); pages 32-33, 70-72, 270.

• The Federal Radio Commission has interpreted the concept of public interest so as to favor in actual practice one particular group ... the commercial broadcasters.
  • E. Pendleton Herring, "Politics and Radio Regulation", Harvard Business Review, January 1935

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Tue Jan 19 17:16:41 2010