Yunis Safarov
We cannot deny that advertising became a part of our life and nowadays it is everywhere. Some people say that we cannot live without advertising because we need leadings and persuasion to buy something and in overall advertising forms our culture. Others think that advertising is annoying and useless and we should avoid or ignore it.
So what is advertising? First of all advertising is a form of Communication, where producer communicates with consumer to persuade him to take action. This could be different types of action. The most common one is commercial offering or as we know advertising of goods to make them sell better. Advertising had a long history beginning with papyrus wall posters in Egypt and Ancient Rome and Greece. Mostly they advertised lost and found and sales messages. There are also traces of advertising on a rock paintings made by Indians back to 4000 BC. But the flourishing period of advertising was 19th and 20th centuries when it found new ways and mediums of influencing on people. One of the major reasons was invention of a print press allowing printing numerous advertisements at once. In the same period appeared false advertising which is one of the bad sides making advertisement look annoying and misleading. In 20th century in USA women already started getting equal rights with men and one of the few jobs available for them was creative processing of advertisements. Advertisers knew that the main customers of household goods are women and therefore women working in their company thing the same way and will be successful in creating persuasive slogans and appeals. Later advertising started using new mediums such as radio in 1920s and commercial television in 1940s. At first there were numerous protests mainly in United Kingdom against commercializing radio as a common source of information which should bring to us only important information. But as we can see it could not change the way it is nowadays. Today we have mass media where information as a one huge stream delivered to everyone and we cannot avoid advertising. Everyone is familiar with annoying pop-ups and pop-under windows in the Internet space. Gaming industry also brought new possibilities to the field of advertisement. It made possible to create computer graphics based advertisement and to broadcast it on special gamers’ channels which are mostly created for purpose of game advertising. Magazines and newspapers are less demanded nowadays which lead to decreasing of advertisement there. The first magazine to publish advertisement on its pages was French La Presse in 1836.
Looking at history of humanity we can conclude that advertising have been present in our life beginning with ancient societies. Nowadays it is everywhere and it is hard to avoid. From my point of view advertising might be annoying and useless but we will not be able to form our culture without its influence. Advertising makes us to buy certain things creating new styles and social portraits. People who work in advertising field are really smart because due to their abilities our minds are easily manipulated. Without advertisement our life would be different and maybe even boring.
Works Cited
Ademola, Owolabi (2005). "Effects of Gender-Role Orientation, Sex of Advert Presenter and Product Type on Advertising Effectiveness". European Journal of Scientific Research 35 (4): 537–543.
Bhatia (2000). Advertising in Rural India: Language, Marketing Communication, and Consumerism.
