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When analysing the current practice of advertising we cannot avoid a brief definition of “advertising” from the marketing point of view.

An advertisement could be simply defined as a commercial message addressed to publicity with which the advertiser wants to improve its sales. Advertisements popularise either an institution, e.g. the name of a firm, or a special product. In this way the main goals of advertising are informing about an institution (e.g. a company, foundation etc.) or a product, persuading of the benefits of the single product and reminding the buyer of all these benefits.

Advertisements are normally transmitted by mass media such as newspaper, magazines, television, radio and Internet. Mass media are the best means of reaching potential buyers, and advertising in mass media is the cheapest way of reaching one person with a commercial message. Readers Digest, for instance got to 20 million readers in 1988. This means that the advertiser, who advertises in Readers Digest reaches 20 million readers with its adverts which cost about 80.000 dollars. That is less than 0.5 cent per capita! Not to mention other internationally distributed publications like the Time Magazine, the National Geographic, etc. and the internationally broadcasted television channels.

According to Philip Kotler (North-western University, Illinois) characteristic features of advertisements are their publicity (adverts are one of the most public form of communication), a wide scale of means of expression and a certain impersonality. Kotler claims here that adverts are monologues, but my personal opinion differs from his statement. In my opinion, advertisements are dialogues if the purchasing of the single buyer might be regarded as a very special sort of feedback.

Companies, whose main activity is advertising itself are becoming more and more important throughout the whole world. These advertising agencies (e.g. Ogilvy & Mather, McCann-Erickson) play a significant role in our everyday-life. We also can observe a clear American domination among the biggest advertising agencies. Out of the worlds 50 largest agencies nearly all are American (2 is Japan with only 7 agencies). As only large, multinational companies (e.g. Coca-Cola, IBM, etc.) can afford to advertise continuously in internationally distributed publications and in world-wide broadcasting television channels adverts of single products are getting more or less similar. An ad of a single product is repeating the same theme all over the world. Philip Morris Inc., for instance promotes its best brand of cigarettes with tough characters of the Wild West in almost every country. Everybody knows which brand the ad is about, namely Marlboro.

The growing standardisation of the advertisements raises another issue. The adverts should be translated into the “local language” of every targeted market. A cowboy, for example on an advert does not mean as a symbol anything to a Japanese housewife. The other problem concerning global advertising is that different kinds of mass media are not equally available for advertising agencies in all markets, and governments try to set limits for advertising in the media. But these all are problems for the agencies to consider.

Finally, the general demand for goods and services is composed of two principal elements, the already existing demand and the generated demand which is created by adverts and other fields of sales promotion. This is why advertisements are essential for almost every company in order to increase the number of the sold products.