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Generally advertising, any openly sponsored offering of goods, services, or ideas through any medium of public communication. At its inception advertising was merely an announcement; the present elaborate form of advertising began to evolve. The advertising agency, working on a commission basis, has been chiefly responsible for this evolution. The largest group of advertisers is known as the advertising contractors, followed by marketers of drugs and cosmetics, soaps, automobiles, tobacco, appliances, and oil products. The major advertising media are newspapers, magazines, television and radio, business publications, billboards, and circulars sent through the mail. With the advent of the wide availability of electronic mail and access to the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the Internet has also become an important advertising venue. It is mass communication an advertiser pays in order to convince a certain segment of the public to adopt ideas or take actions of benefit to advertise.
The major criticisms of advertising are that it creates false values and impels people to buy things they neither need nor want and that, in fact, may be actually harmful (such as cigarettes). In reply, its defenders say that advertising is meant to sell products, not create values; that it can create a new market for products that fill a genuine, though latent, need; and that it furthers product improvement through free competition.
An advertising contractor is in a legal sense one that enters into a binding agreement to perform a certain service of advertising or provide a certain product advertising campaign in exchange for valuable consideration, usually money but sometimes other goods or services in a barter arrangement. Following tasks are performed by the contractor
1. The activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media.
2. The business of designing and writing advertisements.
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