The Untold Truth About Advertising

The world spent over 460 billion dollars in 2012 on advertising. The money is spent by business firms to promote their products and services and by political and nonpolitical groups to raise awareness on different issues. If over 300 billion dollars is spent annually on advertising, then people must be strongly affected by ads, otherwise groups would not spend such a large sum on advertisements. People are affected by advertising, but what does that mean for society? Vitriolic detractors of ads assert that advertisements are a malignant tumor of modern-society whereas proponents of advertising counter that promotions are the backbone of society. While it is true that some advertisements are as harmful as tumors, critics rarely mention the multitude of benefits received from advertising. Advertising has helped the building of economies, countries, and our modern-day culture; without advertisements, civilization never would have advanced from the pre-agricultural communities that once dominated the planet. Therefore, I believe the positive effects of advertising are one of the major factors in the advancement of humanity.

The purpose of advertising is often confused with the effect of advertising. Advertising is a technique used by companies to persuade consumers to buy a certain product or service. Companies use advertising because commercials have “enormous power and economic value” (Shaw). Ads are the easiest way to distribute information at a massive scale and companies are aware of that. With just one well-designed display, millions of consumers will know about the product or service being advertised. Economically, ads are like catalysts, just one ad is necessary to gain a large consumer base, and like a catalyst, a commercia...

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...college, to start a business, and such), and if these people did not see ads promoting constructive ideas, they may have been more people who would have to depend on others to survive. By seeing such ads, many people realized the benefits of making something out of themselves; without such ads, society would consist of only the extremely wealthy and the extremely poor.

Works Cited

American Red Cross poster, 2004

Day, Nancy. Advertising: Information or Manipulation? Berkely Heights: Enslow Publishers, 1999. Print.

Shaw, Eric H. and Stuart Alan. “Cigarettes.” The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising. Ed. John McDonough and Karen Egolf. 3 vols. New York: Fitzray Dearborn, 2003. Print.

"Strategy Analytics: Press Releases." Strategy Analytics: Press Releases. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. .