When you hear the word advertising, what comes to mind?

Do you think of banner ads on your favorite website? Those hilarious Super Bowl commercials? The billboards along the highway or posters in the subway stations?

While most of us have a pretty good idea of what advertising looks like, it’s a little harder to nail down exactly what it means — and how to do it well.

From the printing press to pop-up ads, advertising has certainly changed with the times. Despite this, though, the need for advertising hasn’t changed, and neither have the techniques and best practices that make for quality advertising. That’s what we’ll cover in this guide.

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Advertising vs. Marketing

History of Advertising

Advertising Methods

How to Advertise Online

Advertising Best Practices

Memorable Ad Campaigns


What is advertising?

Advertising is all about creating messages to persuade and motivate someone to take action.

Good advertising is designed to be extremely influential, memorable, and, at times, risqué. It breaks through the clutter and noise of everyday life, disrupts the viewer’s attention, and demands their focus.

Whether on a billboard or the back of a restaurant menu, advertising can go to work for your company in a variety of ways:

  • To raise awareness for your brand

  • To drive potential customers to your business

  • To promote sales for both new and existing products

  • To introduce a new product or service to the market

  • To differentiate your product from your competitors’

Advertising can also be executed in various ways. Radio commercials, billboards, branded t-shirts, and social media endorsements all count as advertising — as we'll discuss later on in this guide.

But, first, how does advertising differ from marketing?

Marketing is the big picture of how a company plans to raise awareness of their brand and convince customers to make a purchase, while advertising is the process of creating the persuasive messages around these broad goals. Advertising is a subset of marketing, which is the umbrella term for communicating with your audience.

Marketing includes a number of different channels, such as social media, email marketing, public relations, SEO, and paid advertising.

Alternatively, advertising is just one component of marketing.

A company’s overarching marketing strategy will typically include an advertising plan. The advertising portion zooms in on the specific process of creating and publishing the persuasive messages to get customers to take action.

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