Advertising is used to publicize a product, service, or idea. Many types of advertising are available for the purpose of building brand awareness and increasing product sales. Advertising is present in almost every aspect of daily life.
Before deciding what types of ads are best, it is important for a company to define the audience they want to target. The specific group which a product is marketed towards is their target audience. Demographic information such as age, gender, education, and income level helps define a target audience. Placing your message in advertising venues focusing on this group, or demographic, is called target marketing and is essential to effective advertising.
Print mediums like magazines, brochures, and newspapers allow the marketer’s message to reach their target audience on the page. Magazines include articles and images intended to attract a specific type of consumer. Magazine publishers have extensive demographic information on their readers, allowing marketers to tailor advertising to speak specifically to their potential customers.
Broadcast advertising includes TV, radio, and Internet messages. Traditional forms of these kinds of advertisements are commercials shown during a television program or before a movie. Product placement advertising is a less obvious way to promote a product. With product placement types of advertising, companies pay to have their product used by a character in the program. When you see someone in a TV show or movie using a specific brand, this is product placement, or covert advertising.
One of the first instances bringing product placement to the public’s attention was in 1982 when the movie E.T. was released. In this movie, characters are seen eating Reese’s Pieces® candy. Sales of Reese’s Pieces® increased substantially as a result of their visibility in this incredibly popular movie, generating publicity about the effectiveness of this type of advertising.
Internet promotion is one of the newer kinds of advertising and can be accomplished in a number of ways. Flash advertising refers to messages that jump onto your computer screen and often move around. They can be hard to close and are annoying, but effective at gaining your attention.
Pop up and scrolling ads are other examples of these types of advertising. Pay per click advertising refers to marketers paying to have their web pages placed high on search engine results pages. These are also called sponsored links.
Outdoor advertising utilizes billboards and signage. These types of advertising include using cars with promotional messages on them, or large signs placed on the sides of buses. They can also be signs on scoreboards or in stadiums drawing the attention of large crowds and television coverage at sporting events