Ever since people established the practices of material exchange and trading, there have been techniques to help promote the popularity of products, techniques that we nowadays call marketing strategies – from salesmen pitches to various consumer reviews that claim a particular product is better than others. In the last century, the advertising industry has grown at an astonishing rate, and immense sums of money are spent annually on ads in the newspaper, on the radio and television, and even on proprietary blimps and the facades of buildings! Is advertising so effective, that it is worth spending trillions of dollars on it? I my opinion, advertising is using up an excessive amount of people’s money, yet it has indirect benefits to society.
To begin, the reasons people should spend less money on ads are that they are in most cases ineffective, misleading, and annoying. Most marketing tricks are now clichés, so making a creative ad has become a daunting task, pulled off by only a few advertisers. People have become so accustomed to seeing ads, that they instinctively ignore them, thus lessening the chance one has to spread a message trough advertising. Also, many ads have misleading information in them. For example, some ads for medication omit important information about the chemicals in a pill, thus threatening consumers that might buy them based only on an advert. Moreover, most people know how annoying it is when an interesting show or film is interrupted for a commercial break every half an hour or so. In fact, some commercials can be so irritating, that they could deter a person from buying their product.
However, advertising can bring benefits in some respects. For example, magazines, TV shows and web sites rely mostly on the advertisements they include for financial support, so if there were less ads, publishers and producers will have a smaller budget, which would eventually reflect on the quality of the show, website, or magazine. Moreover, some adverts are actually informative and very creative. Without them, people may not learn about a product or service that may actually be useful, and the world would be a duller place without the artistic approach of some advertising agencies.
To sum up, I think that an excessive amount of money is spent on advertising, and that people have become jaded by all the commercials they see daily. However, advertising should exist, as it has an instrumental role in supporting the media, helping people find the right choice, and stimulating young artists.
