Defining Advertising In Our Life (2)

By Author: Jordon
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People who want to avoid radio commercials have to ignore the ads being played over the portable radios carried down the street or at the beach, over car radios when they are carpooling, or over the public address Tag Heuer Replica system at the supermarket or shopping mall.

The mass media pervade our environment, and with the mass media come the advertisements that underwrite them. A message tailored to persuade an audience to accept a product is not, in itself, advertising. When the people selling the product pay for time or space to enable them to bring the message in a specific unalterable form to that audience, however, we call the message advertising. An advertiser, within the bounds of taste and the law, controls what the message says, how it says it, and where and how frequently it appears.

The mass media have rules of conduct guaranteeing that the advertisers are able to communicate what they want at the time or in the space purchased. For example, when a television ad is cut short by a technical malfunction or the programming in which ...
... the ad is embedded fails to reach an audience of the size guaranteed by the network, the advertiser is entitled to a "make-good," a rebroadcast of the commercial at a comparable time at no additional charge. Similarly, when a newspaper transposes two prices in an ad, the newspaper will, at no cost to the advertiser, run a correction in the next edition or in the next day's paper.

Some forms of advertising do not fit neatly into this definition because they reach their audiences without the purchase of time or space. The dividing bar that separates your groceries from the next customer's at the checkout counter of the supermarket, for example, may carry a message from a cigarette manufacturer: "For a light smoke—try X." The cigarette manufacturer has given the dividers to the store free of charge, in the hope or with the agreement that they will be used. Their use functions as advertising. When your groceries are bagged, you may notice a message about the store on the bag. When you carry the groceries away from the store or use the bag as a garbage bag in your home, you have become the carrier of an ad for the store, just as you have become a walking ad for Calvin Klein when you wear jeans with his name stitched onto the hip pocket.

A movie hero may drink a certain soft drink—a form of advertising purchased by the soft drink manufacturer in exchange for supplying cast and crew with the product, or in exchange for what is called a "promotional consideration." You may have noticed, for example, that the characters in Moonstruck always celebrated with the same brand of champagne. Similarly, Forrest Gump drank Dr. Pepper throughout the movie that bore the character's name.

The ability to add images digitally that did not occur in the picture in the first place has enhanced moviemakers' ability to generate special effects such as the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. It has also augmented Omega Seamaster Replica Watches the advertiser's ability to place products and the ability of those with a digital camera to alter photographs of family and friends. Jamieson did this at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, by taking a digital picture of the other deans and digitizing Winston Churchill into it. Of course, no one believed that Churchill had risen from the dead to administer at Penn. But who will know that the can of Coke shown for a second or so on the coffee table in the sitcom wasn't there when the show aired on network television but appeared only in syndication?