Ansar M Khawaja
CM124-A History of Broadcasting
Thursday, December 13, 2012
CM124 Final Exam – Q/T #4
Advertising is “the act or practice of calling public attention to one’s product, service, need, etc., especially by paid announcements in newspapers and magazines, over radio or television, on billboards, etc.” (Dictionary.com). Advertising has changed in many ways from when it started being utilized in the past. It has changed overtime due business demands, media technologies, and cultural changes. The first types of advertisements were announcements of goods on hand during the eighteenth century. During this time period ads were placed next to editorial material and Benjamin Franklin was the first one to utilize headlines and illustrations. Ads were used for things other than consumer goods as well. According to Daniel Pope, “particularly disturbing form of early American advertisements were notices of slave sales or appeals for the capture of escaped slaves.”
Furthermore, even during the mid nineteenth century, newspapers rarely printed ads wider than a single column and magazines used to put the ads in the back pages. The total amount of money spent on advertising in America grew from about two hundred million in 1880 to about three billion in forty years. The 1920s were prosperous because more consumer credit was available and ads focused on the goods and services consumers at the time wanted such as: cars, radios, appliances, sporting events, and movie releases. In addition there was mass circulation of magazines, radio broadcasting, and motion pictures had some ads in them as well. Also Pope states, “Perhaps the most striking development in advertising styles has been the shift from attempting to market mass-produced items to an undifferentiated consuming public to ever more subtle efforts to segment and target particular groups for specific products and brands.” So basically advertisers started to market specific goods or services to different...