Marketing communication: principles and practice

A D V E R T I S I N G A S C O M M U N I C A T I N G
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BOX 14.1
WHEN IS ADVERTISING NOT ADVERTISING?
The newly launched online public catalogue of The British Library carries a link to
Amazon.co.uk on the homepage. This carries the words ‘Buy books NOW from our
sponsor’. According to a spokesperson from The British Library, Amazon have
sponsored the site for three years, thus helping to offset the costs of providing the online
catalogue. The text does not constitute an advertisement but a special link that allows
users who search on one service to search automatically on the other. Another librarian
thinks that by carrying an advertisement, the Library’s public service remit is
subverted.
(
Source
: 
Times Higher Education Supplement
, 16 February 2001: 4)

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created a publicity department, while in 1898 New York State felt it was time
to pass a law against misleading advertising (Fang, 1997).
WHAT IS ADVERTISING?
Is advertising superfluous distracting puffery, or a vital informer and
persuader? Is advertising no more than coercive persuasion, or does it allow
argumentation? Is advertising informational or transformational? Is the
attendant consumer or buyer a bewildered manipulant, or the rational
evaluator in search of solutions to problems of dissatisfaction? 
Typically, ‘publicity’ is cast as unpaid advertising (with added credibility).
May it not perhaps be the other way around? Advertising can be thought of
as bought publicity.
In the development of advertising, as a marketing tool and as an industry
in its own right, Leiss 
et al
. (1986) can discern four communicative formats
(explained more fully in Figure 14.2 below). The original informational 
role (i.e. about the product and its utility) gave way to product image, 
brand name, and packaging that gave special qualities by means of sym-
bolic relationships. Post-war, product image was personalized. In recent
years, consumption style has come to the fore. Advertising has become
representational.
In UK society, advertising has become part of our everyday experience,
and largely aspirational. In Germany, France, and Italy, however, this is not
the case. In the UK and USA, advertisements teach consumers their
preferences. This is not true elsewhere, where advertising has remained
merely informational (Lannon and Cooper, 1983). We discussed the cultural
dimension to marketing communication in chapter six.
We should not lose sight of two further facts. Marketers, who advertise,
are customers of a growing and powerful media industry who sell advertising
for profit. Audiences are gathered as gateways, by media operators, for
marketers into markets. Thus, as a member of a gathered audience, we are
offered to marketers as product (see Box 14.2). Further, advertising imagery
can stir up social discontent that has only social remedies – then products
are irrelevant (we will consider the ethical responsibilities of marketing
communication managers in chapter seventeen).