English 1
School of Business and Accountancy
(BABM & BABMM)
Assignment: 20%
Introduction
Advertisements are messages paid for by those who send them and are intended to
inform or influence people who receive them. Advertising is bringing a product or service to
the attention of potential and current customers. Advertising is focused on one particular
product or service. Thus, an advertising plan for one product might be very different than that
for another product. Advertising is typically done with signs, brochures, commercials, direct
mailings or e-mail messages, personal contact, etc. With the aid of advertising, consumers
find and buy necessary products without much waste of time. This speeds up the sales of
commodities, increases the efficiency of labour in distribution, and diminishes the costs of
selling.
There are many positive social impacts on our society from advertising. Advertising
can be used to increase awareness in society about particular issues, and in so doing, becomes
a form of education. Anti-drug advertising such as “It’s OK to say NO”, and drink driving
campaigns are just two examples of how society uses the advertising industry as a means to
promote public welfare. Other forms of socially positive advertising include those advocating
safe sex, thereby considerably slowing the spread of deadly STDs throughout the community.
Next, there are economic benefits experienced by society, as a result of advertising. Without
advertising, the media, including newspaper, television, radio and so on would be much less
vigorous. Advertising provides revenue for commercial mediums which would otherwise
need to be funded by the actual consumer of these mediums. For example, a newspaper
would cost up to three times as much money as advertising provides two thirds of the revenue
of the print media. Another example was all television, bar government funded networks, will
be pay TV since nearly ALL revenue for television is provided by advertising, while the
consumer provides no financial support except for providing the service of watching the
advertising messages. So we can see a major economic infrastructure based around
advertising, in which the big companies fund and subsidise the commercial media by way of
advertising.
In the other hand, advertisement also brought a lot of side effects. Some of the
advertisers had includes sexuality, materialistic, unethical and so on to attract consumers.
Advertisements create an exaggerating and unrealistic image that urges people to buy in on
the products. But the actual products or services will not as good as the advertisements.
Advertisements promote materialism in several ways. The first is by creating new needs and
desires among people. Advertisements also encourage people to compete with each other by
purchasing more and better objects. Finally, advertisements often encourage consumers to
replace their old possessions by purchasing the newest and best model. It seems like all we
see these days are advertisements which use the human body and sexuality to sell all kinds of
products from food and cars to colognes and exercise equipment. Most of the time sexuality
and the use of the product in a real world setting are irrelevant, but for centuries if sexual
