INSTRUCTIONS
Read the complete article about the history of advertising, then complete the
following items.
1. In a complete paragraph of approximately 7 to 10 sentences, write
an objective summary of the article.
2. Based on what you have read, what can you infer about the relationship
between advertising and the price you pay for a product and/or service?
 Please include a direct quote from the article to support your inference.
 Answer the question in 2 to 3 sentences.
ADVERTISING
In the 21st century, with an intensely competitive consumer market, advertisers
increasingly used digital technology to call greater attention to products. In 2009,
for example, the world's first video advertisements to be embedded in a print
publication appeared in Entertainment Weekly magazine. The thin batterypowered screen implanted in the page could store up to 40 minutes of video via
chip technology and automatically began to play when the reader opened the
page.
For an advertisement to be effective, its production and placement must be
based on a knowledge of the public and a skilled use of the media. Advertising
agencies serve to orchestrate complex campaigns whose strategies of media
use are based on research into consumer behavior and demographic analysis of
the market area. A strategy will combine creativity in the production of the
advertising messages with canny scheduling and placement, so that the
messages are seen by, and will have an effect on, the people the advertiser most
wants to address. Given a fixed budget, advertisers face a basic choice: they can
have their message seen or heard by many people fewer times, or by fewer
people many times. This and other strategic decisions are made in light of tests
of the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.
There is no dispute over the power of advertising to inform consumers of what
products are available. In a free-market economy effective advertising is
essential to a company's survival, for unless consumers know about a company's
product they are unlikely to buy it. In criticism of advertising it has been argued
that the consumer must pay for the cost of advertising in the form of higher prices
for goods; against this point it is argued that advertising enables goods to be
mass marketed, thereby bringing prices down. It has been argued that the cost of
major advertising campaigns is such that few firms can afford them, thus helping
these firms to dominate the market; on the other hand, whereas smaller firms
may not be able to compete with larger ones at a national level, advertising at the
local level or online enables them to hold their own.
Finally, it has been argued that advertisers exercise an undue influence over the
regular contents of the media they employ—the editorial stance of a newspaper
or the subject of a television show. In response it has been pointed out that such
influence is counteracted, at least in the case of financially strong media firms, by
the advertiser's reliance on the media to convey a message; any compromise of
the integrity of a media firm might result in a smaller audience for the advertising.