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The Effects of Advertising Essay

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Every time we open a newspaper or we turn on the TV, we see sellers of almost identical products spending huge amounts of money in order to convince us to buy their brands. Every year, each typical American watches 1550 hours of TV, listens 1160 hours on radio, and spends 290 hours reading newspapers and magazines. So every day, each American watches 100 TV advertisements, 100 to 300 ads through other mass media, and in one single year receives 216 pieces of direct mail advertising, and almost 50 phone calls from telemarketers (Pratkanis and Aronson 2). All these, because sellers of everything, from computers to detergents, believe that advertising is essential to the product. Ed Ney, ex-chairman of the Young and Rubicam American agency, …show more content…

Advertising techniques range in complexity from the publishing of simple, straightforward notices in the classified-advertising columns of newspapers to the concerted use of newspapers, magazines, television, radio, direct mail, and other communications media in the course of a single advertising campaign. From its unsophisticated beginnings in ancient times, advertising has burgeoned into a worldwide industry. In the U.S. alone in the late 1980s, approximately $120 billion was spent in a single year on advertising to influence the purchase of commodities and services.
American advertising leads the world not only in volume of business but in the complexity of its organization and of its procedures. For these reasons, this article deals primarily with advertising in the U.S. Modern advertising is an integral segment of urban industrial civilization, mirroring contemporary life in its best and worst aspects. Having proven its force in the movement of economic goods and services, advertising since the early 1960s has been directed in increasing quantity toward matters of social concern. The continuing cancer and antidrug abuse campaigns are only two examples of the use of the advertising industry as a means to promote public welfare.
Advertising falls into two main categories: consumer advertising, directed to the ultimate purchaser, and

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