Advertising plays a unique role in the economic system in all countries. It is a very important way for people to find out about the many different kinds of goods and services they can buy. Producers use advertising to give people information. This information can help people make wise decisions about how to spend their money. In order to make wise decisions, you must first understand what your choices are. Advertising helps people learn about all the many choices available to them. Imagine how difficult it would be for people to travel from store to store to find out the prices of different items in each one. Advertising makes it possible to learn in minutes what it could otherwise take weeks and months to find out.

Television advertising is especially important because television reaches so many people. The people who make advertising for television, who plan and produce the commercials, are extremely careful about every detail to their work. You may have noticed that sometimes a television program just doesn't look or sound quite right. The picture may not be as clear as it should be. Perhaps the sound is ahead of the picture, or behind it. But such flaws are not found in commercials. Commercials are too short, expensive, and important to be done carelessly. The people who appear in the ads are selected with great care. Even the people who are supposed to look "ordinary" are chosen from among hundreds of actors and actresses. Once they are chosen, they practice their parts many times, even if they have two or three words to say. This is part of the reason that commercials take so much time and money to make. It can take a week to make a commercial that lasts all of the three minutes on the air.

How do advertisers know what to advertise on television? How do they decide what kinds of advertisements will best persuade people to buy their product? They do what is called market research . They study the buying habits of people. Sometimes they hire companies to study a particular question for them and to prepare a report. One such company conducted a fairly typical research in 1982. It got 2500 households to cooperate. The people in a small New England town agreed to let the company install a machine at the checkout counter of their local grocery store. The machine scanned, or recorded, what people bought. The company did similar experiments in Wisconsin and in Texas. The purpose was to find out what kinds of things people bought in different parts of the country. This information helped advertisers decide what kinds of products to advertise where.

Another interesting market research study involved a cake mix. This was an extremely simple product to use. You just added some water to the cake mix powder and put the mixture in the oven to bake. But the mix wasn't selling very well and the company wanted to find out why. Their research gave them the surprising answer. People wanted a simple cake mix, but hey didn't want one that simple. They wanted more than just add water. So the company changed the mix to require assign water and then an egg. People like having to add the egg. They felt more as if they were really baking. The new cake mix, with just a little more to do, sold much better.

Market research can also find out what kinds of things in commercials attract people's attention and encourage them to buy a company's product or service. For example, the setting of a commercial can have a great effect on whether people decide to buy. This is one reason why so many ads show people running along beaches and strolling through fields and parks. The great outdoors has proved to be a very effective setting for ads.

Some of the most effective commercials for cars are the ones that use big cats such as cougars, tigers, and jaguars. The pictures of these strong, swift, and graceful animals somehow make a car and the person driving it seems more powerful and more attractive. Other successful commercials for cars show them high atop a mountain or roaring along a country road. But showing cars where they so often are, creeping along in traffic would not be nearly so effective in persuading people to buy them.

Billions of dollars are spent each year on advertising. Much of it is spent for television time. Television time is very expensive. Then there are the costs of actually making the commercial. Some experts have figures that four cents out of every dollar we spend go to pay for advertising the products we buy. Others point out that if it were not for the high prices for advertisers paid to have their products shown on television programs. When advertisers buy time, their money is used to pay for producing the programs you see. So without the ads, there would be many fewer programs, and these would have to be shows that were not expensive to produce.

note: originally posted at Exposeknowledge.com under the same author.