To make something widely known

The word, in Korean as in this account, still holds a plain meaning: to make something widely known. From a marketing seat, advertising is one of the things promotion does, and promotion is one of the strategies for creating or keeping an exchange. It carries information about a good, and it is also meant to move a sale and to serve a marketing aim. From a communication seat, it is simply a form of communication: it takes information about a product or a service to a chosen audience.

The marketing function is set inside a larger process — meeting a consumer’s needs through goods and services. Advertising is said to push a market toward fuller competition, and to offer information that helps people decide. The social function is drawn more widely still. Ads are said to support a consumer’s right to know, and so a basic democratic right; to entertain; to work as a tool of social marketing and to bear on social change; and to open a direct path of talk with consumers. Culture, in this telling, can be turned into a commodity by advertising, and the effect on culture is not only benign. Positive and negative readings of advertising are both kept in view.

Albert Lasker, called here the father of modern advertising, named it a printed salesman. The line is kept because the forms have since multiplied, and the salesman is no longer only on a page.

The rooms it now walks through

The account sorts advertisements first by medium: broadcast — television, radio, cable — and print, in newspapers and magazines; outdoor advertising; transit advertising, inside and outside buses, in the subway, and on vehicles that move the ad as they go; handbills; direct mail; and new-media advertising, named here as the internet and PC communication. Those last names are left as the account gives them.

It also sorts them by who is paying. When the advertiser is the producer of the goods, the ad is a manufacturer’s advertisement. When a retailer sells those goods straight to consumers, it is a retailer’s advertisement. By audience, the split is first between ads aimed at general consumers and ads aimed at businesses: industrial ads for buyers of industrial goods, trade ads for wholesalers and retailers, professional ads for people who hold a credential — physicians, accountants, lawyers — and agricultural ads for people who farm.

By content, an ad may be about a product or a service, or not; and it may be for profit, not for profit, or in the public interest. The same work can be read through a product’s life. Product-awareness ads, in the introduction, try to help people understand and notice a new thing. Competitive ads, in growth and in maturity, try to show why one company’s goods stand above a rival’s, and to pull a sale. Reminder ads, in maturity or decline, work less at teaching or persuading than at keeping the product from fading in memory.

Inform, persuade, remind — and then look at whether it worked

Because an advertisement speaks, for a set stretch of time, to a chosen group, its aim is also sorted by what promotion is trying to do: to make a product or a piece of information known, to persuade, or to keep a brand from being forgotten. Informational ads, used mainly in the introduction, are aimed at building basic demand. Persuasive ads matter more once rivals appear in the growth stage, and their aim is to stir selective demand for one brand among several. Reminder ads, when a product is in maturity or decline, do not so much inform or persuade as keep the thing from slipping out of memory.

Budget decisions, in this account, look at where the product sits in that life, at its share of the market, at how sharp the competition is, at how often the ad will run, and at how distinct the product is. One method, used often by smaller firms, is to set as large a budget as the firm can bear: take total revenue, subtract operating and capital costs, and give a part of what remains to advertising. Another is to set the budget against a competitor — against the industry’s average spend, against the absolute spend of the main rival, or against a rival’s promotion-to-sales ratio.

The copy itself may try to set a product apart by a physical trait, to name a functional benefit of buying it, or to give it a personality by showing the kind of person who uses it. How the message is carried out matters as well as what it says, especially when rival products are much alike, if the work is to catch a chosen audience’s attention. Effect is looked at in two directions. A pre-test shows people the ad and asks how they came to like it, then looks at recall and at a change in attitude. A post-test looks at what the ad did to memory, to awareness, to knowledge of the product, and to preference. Sales effect may be read from a statistical model of past spending and past sales, or from an experiment that sets different budgets in different regions and watches how sales move.

What the sorting is for

The long aim of the advertising, in this account, is still a larger sale and a larger share, and through them a larger return. The sorting is only a way of seeing which form, and which aim, belongs to which moment. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Account of the definition and kinds of advertising, drawing on Park Jong-ui, Marketing Theory, 2004; Ahn Woon-seok and Jang Hyeong-seop, Understanding Marketing, 2003; and Ahn Gwang-ho, Kim Dong-hun, and Kim Yeong-chan, Marketing Strategy, 2002 (Korean source page).
2. Albert Lasker, advertising as a “printed salesman.” American Marketing Association, advertising as an element of promotion.
3. Classifications by medium, advertiser, audience, content, and product life cycle. Informational, persuasive, and reminder aims. Budget methods, copy approaches, pre-tests and post-tests, and sales-effect measures as set out in the account.

Last updated: 14 November 2026