Covert advertising

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 485.

Media

Types of advertising

There are two basic types of advertising: product and corporate advertising. Product advertising aims to increase sales by making a concrete product or service known to a wide audience, and by emphasising its positive qualities. Corporate advertising is not directly concerned with increasing sales of particular merchandise, but more with the brand image of the whole company, which the latter wants to present to the public. It is the job of Public Relations (PR) experts to organise activities and events, which generate positive publicity for the company. A company can advertise in a variety of ways, depending on how much it wishes to spend and the size and type of the target audience.

Commercial advertising media can include wall paintings, billboards, street furniture components, printed flyers and rack cards, radio, cinema and television ads, the Internet and direct mail, shopping carts, skywriting, bus stop benches, human directional, magazines, newspapers, town criers, sides of buses or airplanes, taxicab doors, roof mounts and passenger screens, musical stage shows, subway platforms and trains, elastic bands on disposable diapers, stickers on apples in supermarkets, the opening section of streaming audio and video, posters, and the backs of event tickets and supermarket receipts. Any place sponsors pay to deliver their message through a medium is advertising. The design and organisation of advertising campaign is usually the job of an advertising agency.

According to one more classification, advertising may be either ‘overt' or ‘covert'. The latter takes place when a product or brand is embedded in entertainment and media. For example, in a film, the main character can use an item or other of a definite brand, as in the movie Minority Report, where Tom Cruise's character John Anderton owns a phone with the Nokia logo clearly written in the top corner, or his watch engraved with the Bulgari logo. Another example of advertising in film is in I, Robot, where main character played by Will Smith mentions his Converse shoes several times, calling them "classics," because the film is set far in the future. I, Robot and Spaceballs also showcase futuristic cars with the Audi and Mercedes-Benz logos clearly displayed on the front of the vehicles, respectively. Cadillac chose to advertise in the movie The Matrix Reloaded, which as a result contained many scenes in which Cadillac cars were used. Similarly, product placement for Omega Watches, Vaio, BMW and Aston-Martin cars are featured in recent James Bond films, most notably, Casino Royale.