Advertising

Generally speaking, advertising is the paid promotion of goods, services, companies and ideas by an identified sponsor. Marketers see advertising as part of an overall promotional strategy. Other components of the promotional mix include publicity, public relations, personal selling and sales promotion.

Future

With the dawn of the internet has come many new advertising opportunities. Popup ads, Flash ads, banner ads, and email ads (often a form of spam) abound. What the advertising community has recently begun to do is make the ads themselves desirable to the public. For example: Cadillac chose to advertise in the movie 'The Matrix: Reloaded', which as a result contained many scenes in which Cadillac cars were used. From some points of view the whole movie could be viewed as an ad, but since it was entertaining, the public desired to view it. Each year, greater sums are paid to obtain a commercial spot during the Super Bowl. Companies attempt to make sure these commercials are very entertaining and many members of the public desire to watch them.

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The advertising community has not yet succeeded in making their ads available to the public. Since the dawn of interesting and entertaining (desirable) advertising some people have been so entertained by a particular ad that they might like to watch the ad later or show a friend. The advertising community has not yet made it easy to acquire and watch an ad when and where a member of the public wants to. A few members of the advertising community have used the Internet to widely distribute their ads to anyone who wishes to see or hear them. In the future, more advertisers may wish to do this, possibly by distributing their television advertisements for free from their websites. Considering that in most cases advertisers must pay to get their ads seen or heard, it could be valuable to allow those who wish to watch them to do so freely and even distribute them to others - by that classic method, word-of-mouth.

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Potentially (this has not been achieved to any degree) we could see the advertising community releasing quantities of free advertising content in the form of pictures, sounds and video to the public for whatever use they wish (perhaps under a Creative Commons license) which would likely result in widespread viewing and distribution which is desirable for both the advertiser and the public who enjoy using the content in their own creations.

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