Did You know? An average human is exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 advertsements each day.
Advertisements come in many shapes, sizes, and forms. But what exactly are advertising and its types? Why is advertising important?
Let’s get started.
What Is An Advertisement?
An advertisement is a paid promotional tool endorsed by an identified sponsor to draw public attention to an offering or brand. Advertising is a promotional activity aimed at selling a product or service to a target audience.
This definition of the advertisement has three parts.
- It’s a paid promotional tool: Advertisements are paid promotional messages communicated by some mass communication media.
- An Identified Sponsor Supports It: Ads are supported by advertisers, who pay to create advertising messages, purchase media slots, and monitor advertising efforts.
- It aims to call public attention to an offering or a brand: Advertisements are intended to inform the target audience about a particular offering or a brand or influence them to do specific tasks.
Simply put, an advertisement is a paid communication message planned to inform people about something or to influence them to buy, try or do something.
Advertising vs Advertisement
Advertising is the verb to advertise something (usually a product or brand). An advertisement is a video or picture of a product to inform and sell to the customers. An ad is the same as an advertisement, just a shorter way to say it.
Types Of Advertisements
Advertisements can be categorized into five different types based on what advertising medium a brand uses to communicate its message.
Print Advertisements
Print advertising is a mass advertising strategy that uses hard copy print media such as newspapers, magazines, brochures, flyers, Etc., to communicate advertising messages to customers. It is one of the oldest advertisement types that majorly target and cater to a literate audience.
Broadcast Advertisements
Broadcast advertisements are mass marketing tools that use broadcast mediums like TV and radio to spread the advertising message to a broader audience. These ads rely more on visual communication and can target everyone with access to such mediums irrespective of their literacy level.
Outdoor Advertisements
Outdoor advertisements or out-of-home advertisements are ads that reach customers out of their homes. They use mediums like billboards, buses, taxis, or street elements.
Outdoor advertisements can be digital or traditional, but all of them are targeted to a geographically oriented target audience.
Digital Advertisements
Digital advertising is technology-driven advertising that uses online or digital payment channels to communicate marketing messages to target audiences. Such ads appear online or on digital channels like websites, search engines, social media platforms, mobile apps, and other digital channels.
Product Or Brand Integration
It involves brand or product placement in entertainment media like TV shows, OTT series, YouTube videos, Etc., where the brand is interwoven within the script without looking at sales.
Rather than being disruptive ads, these ads are from a script or a part of entertainment media and communicate the message better.
Objectives Of Advertising
Advertising has three primary objectives: to inform customers about a brand or offering, to persuade them to buy or to do an action, and to remind and reinforce the brand message.
Inform
Advertisements are used to boost brand awareness and brand exposure in the target market. Informing potential customers about the brand and its products is the first step toward attaining business goals.
Persuade
Convincing customers to perform a particular task is a significant objective of advertising. The tasks may involve buying or trying the products and services offered, forming a brand image, developing a favourable attitude towards the brand, etc.
Remind or Retargeting
Another objective of advertising is to reinforce the brand message and to reassure existing and potential customers about the brand vision. Advertising helps the brand to maintain top-of-mind awareness and to avoid competitors stealing the customers. The reminder objective also helps in the word of mouth marketing.
Other objectives of advertising are subsets of these three objectives. These subsets are:
- Brand Building
- Increasing Sales
- Creating Demand
- Engagement
- Expanding Customer Base
- Changing Customers’ attitudes, etc.
Related Article: 13 Objectives of Advertising (You Need To Know)
Importance Of Advertising
We can understand the importance of advertising by dividing it into three parts.
For The Customers
- Increase awareness: Advertisements inform the customers about the available products in the market and help them choose the best product to solve their problems or satisfy their needs.
- Make decision-making convenient: Advertisements communicate the brand message along with the benefits of the brand and offerings. It makes the customer decision-making process easy as the customers get to know what suits their requirements and budget better.
- Ensure better quality – Advertising includes several perceived and unsaid promises the advertiser must fulfil to remain in the market. That ensures quality as a brand wouldn’t want to waste money on false promises.
For The businesses
- Lead to sales: Advertisements increase brand awareness and result in more sales as more and more people enter the brand’s sales funnel.
- Create awareness: Advertisements increase brand awareness and exposure and inform the target audience about the offering.
- Help build a favourable brand image: Smart advertising helps develop a favourable brand image that aligns with the brand identity and helps the business achieve marketing objectives sooner.
- Help differentiate the product: Advertisements aim to position the brand and offering uniquely in the customers’ minds. It eventually results in differentiating the offering from the competition.
- Increase the brand’s goodwill: Advertisements reiterate the brand’s mission and vision and increase its goodwill among the target customers.
For The Society
Advertising helps to educate people. There are also some social issues that are related to advertising, such as child labour, alcohol consumption, the killing of a girl child, smoking, family planning education, etc. Thus, advertising plays a very important role in society.
Examples of Advertising
Advertisement is not new to humans. We encounter advertisements everywhere, from TV to mobile phones, even on a keychain. Following are a few examples of advertising.
TV Advertisements Example
Nike recreates those historical moments in this ad and puts things into perspective.
It emphasizes that all the hard work, the loss, and the decades-long hope for a triumph make this moment beautiful and “Worth the Wait”.
This one’s a tear-jerker and one of the best Nike commercials.
Print Advertisements Example
Keloptic is an online optician that sells eyeglasses and sunglasses. Initially, it may not sound very impressive, but this print ad campaign may even change your opinion of the company.
His advertising agency used Van Gogh’s post-impressionist self-portraits as the perfect means of brand promotion.
Namely, the picture is famous for its blurry colour scheme, which does not make any clear distinction between different colors and tones.
However, here’s the plot twist: Keloptic put glasses in front of the painting to reveal Van Gogh’s face and show the power of his products.
One of the best print ads – so simple, but so clever!
Radio Advertisements Example
Radio advertisements get more attention among the target consumers and are played more often. Here’s an example of a radio ad by Favicol.
Digital Advertisements Example
Digital advertisements are advertisements created specifically for users of the Internet and digital devices. The primary purpose of digital ads is to drive traffic to a business’s website. These ads can be video, image or text ads.
Digital video ads are not limited to 30-second or 50-second slots. This ad from Booking.com is an example of a digital video ad.
Outdoor Advertising Example
Outdoor Advertising include:
- Billboard
- Lamp Post
- Bridge
- Guerilla Advertising
- Point of Sale
- Transit
- Retail
- Stunt Advertising
- Outdoor advertising
An example of an outdoor advertisement is this Fresh salads” by Leo Burnett Chicago for McDonald’s.
That’s all for now, if we missed something please comment below.
