CHAPTER 1 :

Introduction and Overview of Advertising Psychology

PI 31003
ADVERTISING PSYCHOLOGY
MDM. JASMINE ADELA MUTANG
WHAT IS ADVERTISING?
• Everyday we are exposed to
hundreds/thousands of commercial messages
• Forms of (i) Campaign:
- Magazine ads
- Billboards
- Pre-movie commercials
- Web sites
• Everyday we are exposed to
hundreds/thousands of commercial messages
• Forms of ad:
(i) Campaign
- Magazine ads
- Billboards
- Pre-movie commercials
- Web sites
(ii) Publicity product exposure
- TV commercials
- Coupons
- Sales letters
- Event sponsorships
- Telemarketing calls
- E-mails
• these various tools is marketing
communications
• Advertising is a tool
• Advertising is defined as any form of paid
communication by an identified sponsor
aimed to inform and/or persuade target
audiences about an organization, product,
service or idea (Belch & Belch, 2004).

*Notes: Find other definitions of advertising from various

context (psychology, business, societal, academic, etc)
 What is advertising?
• At the beginning of the 20th century, Albert
Lasker, who today is generally regarded as the
father of modern advertising defined
advertising as “salesmanship in print, driven by
a reason why.”

• But that was long before the advent of radio,

television, or the internet. The nature and
scope of the business world, and advertising,
were quite limited.
• A century later, our planet is a far different place. The nature
and needs of business have changed, and so have the concept
and practice of advertising.

• Today, definitions of advertising abound.

• For example, journalists might define it as a communication,

public relations or persuasion process; businesspeople see it
as a marketing process; economists and sociologists tend to
focus on its economic, societal, or ethical significance.

• Some consumers might define it simply as a nuisance.

• Advertising : The structured and composed non-
personal communication in nature, about products
(goods, services, and ideas) by identified sponsors
through various media of informal, usually paid for
and usually persuasive
i. A type of communication. It is actually very
structured form of applied communication,
employing both verbal and nonverbal elements
that are composed to fill specific space and time
formats determined by the sponsor.
i. Directed to groups of people rather than to
individuals. It is therefore nonpersonal,or
mass, communication. These people could
be consumers, who buy products like MINIs
for their personal use. Or they might be
businesspeople who buy fleets of cars for
commercial or government use.
• Most advertising is paid for by sponsors. GM, Wal-Mart,
Coca-cola, and your local fitness salon pay the newspaper
or the radio or TV station to carry the ads you read, see,
and hear. But some sponsors don’t have to pay for their
ads.
• The American Red Cross, United Way, and
American Cancer Society are among the many
national organisations whose public service
messages are carried at no charge because of
their non-profit status.

• Likewise, a poster on a school bulletin board

promoting a dance is not paid for, but it is still an
ad – a structured, non-personal, persuasive
communication.
• Of course, most advertising is intended to be
persuasive – to win converts to a product, service, or
idea. Some ads, such as legal announcements, are
intended merely to inform, not to persuade. But they
are still ads because they satisfy all the other
requirements of the definition.

• In addition to promoting tangible goods such as

oranges, oatmeal, and olive oil, advertising helps
publicize the intangible services of bankers,
beauticians, bike repair shops, bill collectors, and
telephone companies.
• Increasingly, advertising is used to advocate a
wide variety of ideas, whether economic,
political, religious or social. In this course the
term product encompasses goods, services,
and ideas.
• An ad identifies its sponsors. This seems obvious. The
sponsor wants to be identified, or why pay to advertise?
One of the basic differences between advertising and public
relations, though, is that many PR activities (for example,
publicity) aren’t openly sponsored.
• Finally, advertising reaches us through a channel of
communication referred to as a medium. An advertising
medium is any paid means used to present an ad to its
target audience.
• Thus, we have radio advertising, television
advertising, newspaper ads, and so on. When you tell
somebody how sweet the latest MINI cooper S looks,
that’s sometimes called word-of-mouth (WOM)
advertising. Although WOM is a communication
medium, it’s not an advertising medium. It’s not
structured, sponsored, or paid for.
• Historically, advertisers have used the traditional mass media (the
plural or medium) – radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, and billboards –
to deliver their messages.

• But today technology enables advertising to reach us efficiently

through a variety of addressable media (for example, direct mail)
and interactive media (like the internet).
• Advertisers also use an increasing variety of other
nontraditional media such as shopping carts, blimps,
and DVDs to find their audience.
• The planning, scheduling, and buying of media space
and time are so important to advertising effectiveness.
 What makes advertising unique?
• First and foremost, advertising is communication – a special
kind of communication.

McCann Worldgroup, the ad agency for MasterCard, claims that advertising is “truth well told”.

• This means that ethical advertisers, and the agencies they

employ, work as a team to discover and use the best
methods possible to tell their story truthfully and creatively.
• To succeed, they must understand the elements of the
advertising communication process, which is derived from
the basic human communication process.
 The human communication process
• The traditional model in Exhibit 1-1 summarises the
series of events that takes place when people share
ideas in informal oral communication.

Enc Me Cha Dec Rec Noise

Sou
odi ssa nne odi eiv
rce Feedback

ng ge l ng
Noise
Exhibit 1 – 1 er
•The process begins when one party, called the source,
formulates an idea, encodes it as a message, and sends it
via some channel to another party, called the receiver.
• The receiver must decode the message in order to
understand it. To respond, the receiver formulates
new idea, encodes it, and then sends the new
message back through some channel.
• A message that acknowledges or responds to the
original message constitutes feedback, which also
affects the encoding of a new message.
• All this takes place in an environment characterized
by noise – the distracting cacophony of many other
messages being sent at the same time by other
sources.
• Applying this model to advertising, we could say that
the source is the sponsor, the message is the ad, the
channel is the medium, the receiver is the consumer
or prospect, and the noise is the din of competing
ads and commercials.
• But this model oversimplifies the process that occurs
in advertising or other sponsored marketing
communications. It doesn’t take into account either
the structure or the creativity inherent in composing
the advertising message.
• We need to consider some of the many
complexities involves, especially with the
advent of interactive media, which let
consumers participate in the communication
by extracting the information they need,
manipulating what they see, and responding
in real time.
 Applying the Communication Process to Advertising

• Communications scholar Barbara Stern sees

advertising as a form of structured, literaturarily text,
rather than different from the spontaneous, word-of-
mouth communication of oral speech.

• She proposes a more sophisticated communication

model, derived from the traditional oral one but
applied specifically to advertising as composed
commercial text rather than informal speech.
• The Stern model recognises that in advertising,
dimensions exist in the real world; others exist
on a different level of reality – a virtual world
within the text of the advertising message itself.
* Please do extra readings on the Stern Model
• Example : The World Wide Web is the fastest-
growing medium for advertisers, this web site
helps to promote the 2008 Summer Olympics in
Beijing.
 Advertising and the Marketing Process
• Advertising helps the organization achieve its
marketing goals. So do market research, sales, and
distribution. And these other marketing specialties all
have an impact on the kind of advertising a company
employs.
• An effective advertising specialist must have a brand
understanding of the whole marketing process in
order to know what type of advertising to use in a
given situation.
• Companies and organization use many different types of
advertising, depending on their particular marketing
strategy.
• The marketing strategy will determine who the targets of
advertising should be, where ads should appear, what media
should be used, and what advertising should accomplish.
• Exhibit 1-2 shows some of the ways advertising can be
classified, based on these strategic marketing elements.
These criteria will also determine what different advertising
skills are required.
 Identifying Target Markets and Target Audiences

• A firm’s marketing activities are always aimed at a

particular segment of the population – its target
market.
• Likewise, advertising is aimed at a particular group
called the target audience. When we see an ad that
doesn’t appeal to us, it may be because the ad is not
aimed at any of the groups we belong to.
• Example: A TV commercial for denture cream
isn’t meant to appeal to youngsters. They’re
not part of either the target market or the
target audience. There are two main types of
target markets, consumers and business.
 FUNCTIONS OF ADVERTISING
• Imagine a world without advertising. What
would it be like?
• No interruptions to movies on TV by
commercial breaks, no billboards, etc?
BUT
• There would also be no newspapers and
magazines, no TV's, no radio, fewer sports
competition such as tennis, football, F1, etc
WHY?
• Because all depend largely on commercial
sponsorship.
• Knowledge of ‘what is out there’, what
products are available, with what attributes, at
what price and which outlet, would be
seriously impaired.
• In short, advertising does have its place in society, both
at aggregate and individual level.
• In contemporary industralized societies, advertising
serves several function:
- Facilitating competition
- Communicating with consumers about product and
services
- Funding public mass media and other public resources
- Creating jobs
- Informing and persuading the individual consumer
Reference:
Arens, W.F., Weigold, M.F., & Arens, C. (2009).
Contemporary Advertising (12th ed.) Boston:
McGraw-Hill.
 GENERAL INFORMATION
CONTENT OUTLINE OF THE COURSE

WEEK TOPIC
1 Introduction and overview
2 Consumer Behaviour and Advertising
3 Advertising’s Role in Marketing
4 Advertising and Society
5 Special Advertising
6 How Advertising Works
7 Emotions in Advertising
8 Information Processes
9 Exposure, Attention and Perception
10 Advertising and Media
11 Culture, Communications, and Media
12 Ethics, Social Responsibility in Advertising
13 Advertising Research
14 Advertising and Strategic Planning
Assessment Methods and Types:
The assessment will be based on the following:
Component Weight

Theory 60%

 Midterm exam 20%

 Final exam 40%

Practical 40%
 Individual Assignment 15% Journal Review
 Group Assignment (inclusive presentation) 25% Advertisement

Total 100%
*All components of the above assessment are compulsory and must be completed before the
stipulated dateline.
 Text books and references:

Moriaty, S. , Mitchell, N, & Wells, W. (2009). Advertising: Principles and Practice (8 th

ed.)New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Arens, W.F., Weigold, M.F., & Arens, C. (2009). Contemporary Advertising (12 th ed.)
Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Hoyer, W.D., & Maclnnis D.J. (2008). Consumer Behaviour ( 5 th ed.) China: Centgage
Learning.

Mooij, M.D. (2011). Consumer Behaviour and Culture (2 nd ed.) Los Angeles: Sage
Publications, Inc.

Journal of Economics and Business

Journal of Communication

Behaviour (http://www.ingentaconnect.com/)

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies