Marketing communication: principles and practice

LEARNING POINTS
Careful study of this chapter will help you to:
• appreciate the contemporary use of advertising in its many forms
• critically examine advertising as a corporate, supposedly credible and
creative phenomenon that pervades our lives in attempting to link products
with satisfactions
• understand how and why the form and use of advertising is changing

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Advertising: the poetry of euphemism.
(Anthony Trollope)
INTRODUCTION
Advertising is an institutional model of communication that is deeply rooted
in daily interests and has continued to contribute to the reproduction of the
social conditions and values of a mode of living and a social system.
Advertising is an integral part of ‘free-market’ economies that enables
consumers and buyers to locate and compare brands and to understand
distinctions and innovations among proliferating product offerings. Thus,
advertising has a vital role in helping to inform purchase decisions. Today,
advertising has a social role in connecting persons with products and images
of well-being, reaching into our personal concerns about personal identity,
interpersonal relationships, happiness, affluence, stereotypes, sex roles,
cultural traditions, persuasion, personal autonomy, the role of business in
society, and so on. Advertising is not simply a conveyor of information and
persuasive messages, it is a massive and pervasive industry, afforded great
prominence in our lives, that provides social communication. Today, much
of our communication of attitudes, expectations, and sense of identity, is
about and through objects (consumer products). In 1999, according to the
Advertising Association, advertising spend in the UK topped £15.3 billion
– that’s £250 for every person living in the UK, and almost 2 per cent of our
GDP. This was an increase of 6.4 per cent on the previous year and the eighth
consecutive annual increase. Newspaper advertising accounted for 51.1 per
cent of the total.
Advertising is the art of making commodities communicate with us
(Dichter, 1960). Arguably, much product advertising entices us to ‘come
and get me’, but ignores the other part of the bargain, the obligation to 
pay (Gabriel and Lang, 1995). The market, and its commercial advertising,
is not primarily a ‘want-satisfying’ mechanism: it is a ‘want-creating’
mechanism. Blythe (2000) has distinguished advertising that is wanted by
consumers because it is useful to them (sought advertising) from advertisers’
efforts to attract attention (unsought advertising). He suggests that classified
advertising helps people to find the products they want, whereas display
advertisements distract in order to attract.
The advent of the Internet is shaking the foundations of the advertising-
media industry. The converging telecommunication and computer tech-
nologies can definitively tie the information that consumers apprehend to
the purchases they make. The rapid growth in Internet use has stimulated
competitive advertising by providing a new place, particularly for targeting
young people (see Box 14.1). Also, new dotcom businesses are buying
advertising to build their presence and customer bases. New technology 
is changing commercial television as an advertising medium. Cable TV,
video-on-demand, and personal video recorders (PVR) are set to become
commonplace. The last allows viewers to skip past advertising to their
favourite programmes. Personalized virtual television programming will shift