Imagine a peacock and world flowers. The colors, sounds, and displays of the rest of the species convey that you are a suitable mate. Plant seeds and pollen are spread by other animals only if they can attract attention. Humans instinctively understand and respond to advertisements. It is encoded in our genes from eons of evolution.
Product advertising is an obvious extension of this evolutionary phenomenon. We take advantage of technologies that grab people’s attention to get them to consider a purchase or an idea. The way we imagine advertising in its many forms did not arise until the advent of mass production with the Industrial Revolution.
Prior to that time, products were traded within small communities, and there was no need to attract a large audience. Indeed, the illiteracy rates were so high that the advertisements would have proved useless. Once markets expand beyond close-knit groups, word of mouth will no longer suffice to sell your wares.
Mass production allowed for several revolutions that drove advertising practices. Firstly, printing became much cheaper because it was automated. This means that companies can mass produce ads for the first time. In addition, societies are beginning to realize the need for education. Therefore, explosions of both the ability to read and the availability of print led to the growth of advertising during the Industrial Revolution.
Advertising quickly became an industry in itself when newspapers and magazines began allowing paid advertisements to be placed in their publications. This allowed the professionals to make a living designing and executing advertisements rather than manufacturing the products themselves.
Each new means of communication developed opened doors for advertising. Printing gained mass appeal soon after the start of the Industrial Revolution. The next big leap was radio, a medium whose popularity had exploded since the 1920s. The advent of radio commercials coincided with this development.
Television followed the same marketing path as radio, starting in the 1950s. The next, and perhaps the biggest, advancement in advertising was the spread of the Internet in the 1990s. Each medium has progressively widened the potential audience to the point where advertising today can reasonably reach everyone in the world.
In fact, it can be said that advertising has made various media possible. Interestingly, the need for advertising has grown over time. In print media, selling subscriptions without ads can keep publishing going. Of course, additional income from advertising can greatly expand profitability. Radio relied heavily on advertisers because broadcast signals could not be limited to just subscribers at the time. Therefore, the sale of advertising raised the radio medium to profitability.
Until cable became popular, television was the same as radio. Signals were randomly broadcast to antennas in homes, so it was necessary to sell advertising to support the industry. With the acquisition of cable and other subscription-based services in the 1980s, television was able to detach itself somewhat from the need to sell advertising for support.
The Internet provided a particularly difficult medium for marketing. A subscription based website can easily be undermined by similar free sites. The availability of widely available free material has made advertising necessary to support Internet projects unless a tangible product is being sold. At that time, many people felt that the Internet was not profitable.
Nowadays, advertising is firmly integrated into every medium available to us. Commercials appear on radio, television, and in videos on the Internet. Ads are placed liberally on web pages, on billboards, on buildings, and on buses to get your attention. Reaching out to an audience to persuade them has never been so easy and complicated at the same time as it is today.
The sheer amount of information bombarding everyone means your ad has to stand out in order to be recognized. Despite this challenge, there is no better way to support a product than through successful advertising.