Why do commercials exist

The abridged version: De Beers helped make buying diamonds an engagement norm. And how owning products made by the so-called best brands has become something to aspire to. Advertising has led to people shaping their identities via the products they surround themselves with. To quote author and communications professor Aeron Davis :. One such critic, journalist Vance Packard, published the book The Hidden Persuaders in , which stayed on the bestseller list for 18 weeks.

Or, as Packard put it perhaps a bit more elegantly :. Much of it seems to represent regress rather than progress for man in his long struggle to become a rational and self-guiding being. And while preserving humanity might not be top-of-mind when we use ad-blockers or pay Netflix each month, many of us are making a conscious effort to avoid ads. The number one group that people try to avoid online? While once viewed, perhaps, as cultural pleasantries — fun little bits of entertainment e.

An extreme take on that position can be seen in the letter below, which is commonly attributed to the graffiti artist Banksy. So with this all this negativity surrounding the institution of advertising, you gotta wonder: Why is it still around? Why do companies still dole out millions on something that they know is going to annoy everyone? Illustrations by T. Blake Littwin. Full-time stay-at-home dad, part-time ghostwriter, retired pub musician, recovering marketer. We bring you stories, insights, and ideas to help you and your business grow.

Sign in. Most Recommended Editor's Choice. Erik Devaney Follow. To quote an article on the history of advertising from the Maryland State Archives : Traditionally, businesses would post brief assessments of their wares in the advertising sections of newspapers, merely providing a list of their goods to inform the public of what was available for purchase.

Nobody expects … Wait, nope. Viewers watch TV with a mobile device nearby. Second screen watching means any call to action from an advert can be instantly acted upon by the viewer.

Before the second screen phenomena, viewers would need to retain a brand or call to action message and act upon it later. There are two types of advertising: branding an attempt to influence what people feel about your company and direct selling trying to get people to buy a product. A good TV advert that is well-designed, engaging, and shown on the right channels to the right people, at the correct times, will do wonders for your bottom line.

The best piece of advice is to choose an agency that specialises in creating and placing TV ads. They will help you make an excellent advert from your brief, and even help you write that brief.

They will also ensure your advert gets seen by a captive audience, based on customer profiling and viewing behaviours. Manhunt 20 September — 7. A TV advertising campaign often hits like a wave.

A business needs to be prepared for one of the main advantages of TV advertising — reach. The surge of interest from a TV advert can overwhelm a creaky website wasting precious spend. Another thing to pay attention to is social media, the word soon spreads about a new advert, and people will start hunting down the advert online. Getting free site visits from a social buzz is one of the bonus advantages of TV advertising. However, they must be executed well to seem authentic and credible to the the target audience.

A poorly executed emotional appeal can come across as trite or manipulative. Examples of emotional appeals include:. The following Heinz Ketchup commercial offers a humorous example of an ad based entirely on an emotional appeal:.

The media plan is a document that outlines the strategy and approach for an advertising campaign, or for the advertising component in an IMC campaign.

The media plan is developed simultaneously with the creative strategy. A standard media plan consists of four stages: a stating media objectives; b evaluating media; c selecting and implementing media choices; and d determining the media budget.

The process of evaluating media involves considering each type of advertising available to a marketer, and the inherent strengths and weaknesses associated with each medium. The table below outlines key strengths and weaknesses of major types of advertising media. Television advertising is a powerful and highly visible medium, but it is expensive to produce and buy air time. Radio is quite flexible and inexpensive, but listenership is lower and it typically delivers fewer impressions and a less-targeted audience.

Most newspapers and magazines have passed their advertising heydays and today struggle against declining subscriptions and readership. Yet they can be an excellent and cost-effective investment for reaching some audiences. Display ads offer a lot of flexibility and creative options, from wrapping busses in advertising to creating massive and elaborate 3-D billboards.

Yet their reach is limited to their immediate geography. Online advertising such as banner ads, search engine ads, paid listings, pay-per-click links and similar techniques offers a wide selection of opportunities for marketers to attract and engage with target audiences online.

Yet the internet is a very crowded place, and it is difficult to for any individual company to stand out in the crowd. Banner ads, search ads, paid listings, pay-per-click links, etc. Many advertisers rely heavily on the research findings provided by the medium, by their own experience, and by subjective appraisal to determine the best media for a given campaign. To illustrate, if a company is targeting young-to-middle-aged professional women to sell beauty products, the person or team responsible for the media plan should evaluate what options each type of media offers for reaching this audience.

How reliably can television, radio, newspapers or magazines deliver this audience? Media organizations maintain carefully-researched information about the size, demographics and other characteristics of their viewership or readership.

Cable and broadcast TV networks know which shows are hits with this target demographic and therefore which advertising spots to sell to a company targeting professional women.

Likewise newspapers know which sections attract the eyeballs of female audiences, and magazines publishers understand very well the market niches their publications fit. Online advertising becomes a particularly powerful tool for targeted advertising because of the information it captures and tracks about site visitors: who views and clicks on ads, where they visit and what they search for. Not only does digital advertising provide the opportunity to advertise on sites that cater to a target audience of professional women, but it can identify which of these women are searching for beauty products, and it can help a company target these individuals more intensely and provide opportunities for follow-up interaction.

The following video further explains how digital advertising targets and tracks individuals based on their expressed interests and behaviors. You can read a transcript of the video here. The media planner must make decisions about the media mix and timing, both of which are restricted by the available budget.

The media-mix decision involves choosing the best combination of advertising media to achieve the goals of the campaign. This is a difficult task, and it usually requires evaluating each medium quantitatively and qualitatively to select a mix that optimizes reach and budget.

Unfortunately, there are few valid rules of thumb to guide this process, in part because it is difficult to compare audiences across different types of advertising media. For example, Nielsen ratings measure audiences based on TV viewer reports of the programs watched, while outdoor billboard audience-exposure estimates are based on counts of the number of automobiles that pass particular outdoor poster locations.

It includes not only the scheduling of advertisements, but also the size and position of the advertisement. When considering advertising as a marketing communication method, companies need to balance the cost of advertising—both of producing the advertising pieces and buying placement—against the total budget for the IMC program. The selection and scheduling of media have a huge impact on budget: advertising that targets a mass audience is generally more expensive than advertising that targets a local or niche audience.

It is important for marketers to consider the contribution advertising will make to the whole. Although advertising is generally one of the more expensive parts of the promotion mix, it may be a worthwhile investment if it contributes substantially to the reach and effectiveness of the whole program. Alternatively, some marketers spend very little on advertising because they find other methods are more productive and cost-effective for reaching their target segments. Advertisements use several common elements to deliver the message.

The visual is the picture, image, or situation portrayed in the advertisement. The visual also considers the emotions, style, or look-and-feel to be conveyed: should the ad appear tender, businesslike, fresh, or supercool?