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Media advertising is a multi million pound business and incorporates some of the highest paid executives in the salaried world.
It is always specifically targeted towards a particular audience with clever tricks to entice people to buy every product on the market. In fact, without media advertising, many products fall by the way side and are discontinued.
Most media vehicles make the bulk of their money through advertising and the success of a whole company can ride very heavily on this. You can be sure the most stressed individual in a company will be within the advertising personnel.
Without a doubt these days, TV is the biggest medium for advertising. Reaching into virtually every home in the world on a 24 hour basis, campaigns are run by various companies to sell their products and services.
Christmas time is the biggest seller and advertisers know full well the pressure that children put on their parents to have the latest toy or the latest electronic gadget. The parents that can afford all these things will often buy out of the guilt they feel for going out to work and parents in some communities feel pressure from each other to make sure their child has all the latest gizmos.
To this end, from September through to the end of December, TV advertising is aimed at children. It is also a very predictable form of media advertising. Straight after Christmas comes the adverts for the January sales, closely followed by holiday advertising.
At the same time, we are bombarded with advertisements for diet clubs and beauty products to help us recover from the festive season. However, TV as an advertising medium can also be very effective at reaching the widest audience for educational purposes and has often been used for health campaigns.
Magazines have a specific audience to target as they know the type of people that purchase their magazine. In fact, the last three pages of many women's magazines are devoted to cosmetic surgery advertising.
Women's magazines will be crammed with adverts for beauty products, plastic surgery and dietary supplements. It involves anything to make us look more youthful and more beautiful, depicted by beautiful women with huge eyes, eyelashes that should really require scaffolding for health and safety reasons and the flawless skin of a baby.
Men's magazines are similar in that they appeal to the ego with promises of a better body, usually symbolised with a toned man sporting orange skin waxed to within an inch of his life. However, the man's magazine will often have more lifestyle advertising, offering sports events and sports toys and gadgets for all his spare time.
Even children's comics will contain a certain, though limited, amount of advertising.
Radio is another avenue for media advertising though not as widely used. People listening to radio will be interested in some of the advertising but attention span is usually short and too much advertising will cause a listener to change channels rather than buy the advertised product.
National newspapers devote approximately a third of their daily newspaper to advertising and can be quiet useful if you are looking for something specific. Each day will usually be targeted towards a specific type of advertising, whether it be financial, holidays, recruitment or classifieds.
Local newspapers, as well as local radio, are good mediums for advertising local events and companies. This is a relatively cheap way of advertising and reaching potential customers in your immediate area.
If you are looking for something in particular then specific publications are a good way to find the product or service you need, for example, gay and lesbian publications are a good place to look for recruitment because you can be sure of being placed with an employer who is not biased in any way.
In general, media advertising is to draw your attention to the products and services available. It also a way of convincing you that you need something when you don't. It is an easy way of playing to people's egos and convincing them that if they just bought this product they could look better, have a better lifestyle, be richer, be more popular etc etc.
Always make an informed decision of your own and do not be swayed by advertising techniques.
Author Resource:- Advertising expert Catherine Harvey looks at the media advertising taking up today's publications. To find out more please visit http://www.millivres.co.uk/
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