AdvertisingI. The definition of advertising—【B1】__

Advertising
    Good morning, everyone. In today’s lecture, we’ll mainly talk about the advertisement in our life. To start, I’d like to have an introduction to advertising first.
    Advertising can be defined as a paid form of non-professional but encouraging, complimenting and positively favorable presentation of goods and services to a group of people by an identified sponsor. It does not include distribution of free samples or offering bonuses, these are sales promotion. In simplest words, advertising is an introduction to consumers and general public, of services and goods.
    In a modern society, no company can hope to make a profit on any product unless it advertises it first. Advertising creates brand awareness in general public and to make business more popular within the circle of potential buyers. Advertising, in a straight line, increases profit of the companies by escalating its revenue. The expenditure made on advertisement can turn as good boost in earnings.
    Therefore, the most important decision that a company has to make regarding advertising is where to advertise. On TV? In magazines? On the radio? In newspapers? We refer to these means of communication as "the media." There are three categories of media: print, broadcast, and direct. Today, we are going to describe each of these categories and discuss their importance and usefulness in advertising.
    The first category, the print media, consists of printed information sources; in other words, newspapers and magazines. For the advertisers, each of these has certain advantages and disadvantages. Let’s talk first about newspapers, which receive more money from advertisements each year than any other medium. This is because newspaper advertising has several outstanding advantages. First of all, nearly everybody reads newspapers. Therefore, newspaper ads reach huge numbers of people. Moreover. Newspapers are generally local. This allows small, local businesses to advertise directly to their potential customers. Third, newspaper advertising is relatively cheap; so the ad can be as long as the advertiser wants, and it can also be repeated. On the other hand, newspaper ads have no color, and they are not very exciting or glamorous. Instead, you find these ads in the second type of print medium, magazines.
    For the advertiser, the greatest advantage of magazines is that they have specialized groups of readers. In other words, the people who read Car and Driver are probably not the same people who read Glamour, which is a women’s magazine, or The New Republic, a political magazine. Therefore, advertising in a magazine allows a business to direct its ads to the people who are most interested in the product. The big disadvantage of magazine advertisement is that it can be very expensive, especially in magazines like Playboy or National Geographic.
    Let’s move along now and talk about the broadcast media, by which we mean radio and television. These also have both advantages and disadvantages. First, radio. Radio has two of the same advantages as newspapers: Almost everybody listens to it, and it’s usually local. However, the radio is a background medium, and most listeners are doing something else while listening, which means that the ad has to work hard to get their attention. Further, because radio listeners are spread over many stations, a company may have to advertise simultaneously on several stations to reach target audience.
    Millions of dollars are spent each year on radio ads, but millions more are spent on television advertising. You can easily understand why. Of all the media, TV, with sound, sight, and motion, is the most dramatic, so the ads are easy to remember. How many of you, for example, can sing the slogan for Coca-Cola, "It’s the real thing?" That’s because TV permits ads to reach large numbers of people on a national or regional level in a short period of time. On the other hand, ads on TV are enormously expensive. For example, a thirty-second commercial during the evening can cost $150,000. Obviously, only large companies can afford to advertise on television.
    There is one more category of media that is used extensively in advertising. These are the direct media. The most common direct media is the mail, and direct mail advertising is a very big business. Even if you have only lived in this country for a short time, you have probably already received advertisements in the mail. The advantage of advertising by mail is that advertising message is targeted to those most likely to buy the product or service. However, many people don’t bother to read these ads; in fact, we call them "junk mail" and often throw them away without even opening the envelope.
    Another direct medium is billboards; these are the huge signs that you see whenever you drive down the street. Billboards are useful because they are colorful and easy to see. And the message is permanent. However, the message must be short enough for drivers to read as they are passing by.
    The third type of direct medium is signs and posters. They are usually used in what is called "point of purchase" advertising — that is, ads that appear in the same place where the product is being sold. You can see point of purchase advertising every time you go to the supermarket. There are always signs in the window telling you what is on sale that day. This is also a kind of advertising. Its great advantage is that it is cheap.
    OK. This brings us to the end of today’s lecture. I hope now you have a better understanding of different advertising media. In our next lecture, we’ll discuss in detail how to choose the best advertising media for different types of companies.