media and advertising essay

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Media and Advertising Essay Titles

IELTS Essay Questions for the Topic of Media and Advertising. All essay questions below are reported by IELTS candidates and seem to have been repeated over the years. Regardless of the years the questions were reported, you could get any question below in your test. You should, therefore, prepare ideas for all questions given below. The topics below could appear in both GT and Academic IELTS Writing Task 2.

Media & Advertising Essay Questions for IELTS Writing Task 2

Some companies sponsor sports as a way to advertise themselves. Some people think it is good, while others think there are disadvantages to this. Discuss both sides and give your opinion. (Reported 2017, Academic Test)

Violence in the media promotes violence in society. To what extent do you agree? (repeated topic)

Most people think that the truth should be objective rather than subjective when it comes to the news. Do you think all news is true? What is the function of a newspaper? (2020, 2021, 2022)

More and more newspapers and news channels are using photographs to support their news articles and stories. Some people think that photographs are not a reliable source of news, while others consider photographs to be irrefutable. Discuss both sides and give your opinion. (2016, 2018, 2019, 2021)

The majority of news being reported is bad news such as wars, famines, accidents and crime. Why do you think that is? Do you think the news should be a balance of both good and bad news? (quite common topic)

In the last few decades, there have been more and more cases of famous people being hounded by the press. Some people think that famous people in the media should have no right to privacy. To what extent do you agree?  (repeated topic – this is frequently a current world issue)

With the development of online media, there is no future for the radio.

To what extent do you agree? (2016, 2017, 2018, 2020)

Some people believe that what children watch on television influences their behaviour. Others say that amount of time spent watching television influences their behaviour. Discuss both views and give own opinion  (Reported in 2017, 2020)

Some people think that cinemas will one day close due to the popularity of online streaming services for films and series. Do you agree or disagree? (2023)

Companies spend millions each year on advertising online, in magazines and on billboards. These adverts can encourage people to buy goods that they do not really need. What are the positive and negative affects of consumerism?

One of the prime times for advertising on TV is when children get back from school. Some people think that advertisements aimed at children should not be allowed. What is your opinion? (common question regarding advertising and the affect it has on children)

Some people prefer to watch foreign films rather than locally produced films. Why is this? Do you think the government should spend more money supporting the local film industry? (2015, 2017, 2020, 2022)

Some people think that foreign films have a negative impact on local culture. To what extent do you agree or disagree? (2020

Films that are based on historical events ought to be completely accurate. Do you agree? (2019, 2021, 2023)

Many people buy products that they do not really need and replace old products with new ones unnecessarily. Why do people buy things they do not really need? Do you think this is a good thing? (repeated topic)

Many people think that fast food companies should not be allowed to advertise, while others believe that all companies should have the right to advertise. What is your opinion?

Reported essay questions are from students who have taken their IELTS test. That means questions may have appeared more frequently than have been reported. These questions may vary slightly in wording and focus from the original question. Also note that these questions could also appear in IELTS speaking part 3 which is another good reason to prepare all questions thoroughly.

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Essay On Advertisement

500 words essay on advertisement.

We all are living in the age of advertisements. When you step out, just take a quick look around and you will lay eyes upon at least one advertisement in whichever form. In today’s modern world of trade and business, advertisement plays an essential role. All traders, big and small, make use of it to advertise their goods and services. Through essay on advertisement, we will go through the advantages and ways of advertisements.

The Various Ways Of Advertisement

Advertisements help people become aware of any product or service through the use of commercial methods. This kind of publicity helps to endorse a specific interest of a person for product sale.

As the world is becoming more competitive now, everyone wants to be ahead in the competition. Thus, the advertisement also comes under the same category. Advertising is done in a lot of ways.

There is an employment column which lists down job vacancies that is beneficial for unemployed candidates. Similarly, matrimonial advertisement help people find a bride or groom for marriageable prospects.

Further, advertising also happens to find lost people, shops, plots, good and more. Through this, people get to know about a nearby shop is on sale or the availability of a new tutor or coaching centre.

Nowadays, advertisements have evolved from newspapers to the internet. Earlier there were advertisements in movie theatres, magazines, building walls. But now, we have the television and internet which advertises goods and services.

As a large section of society spends a lot of time on the internet, people are targeting their ads towards it. A single ad posting on the internet reaches to millions of people within a matter of few seconds. Thus, advertising in any form is effective.

Benefits of Advertisements

As advertisements are everywhere, for some magazines and newspapers, it is their main source of income generation. It not only benefit the producer but also the consumer. It is because producers get sales and consumer gets the right product.

Moreover, the models who act in the advertisements also earn a handsome amount of money . When we look at technology, we learn that advertising is critical for establishing contact between seller and buyer.

This medium helps the customers to learn about the existence and use of such goods which are ready to avail in the market. Moreover, advertisement manages to reach the nooks and corners of the world to target their potential customers.

Therefore, it benefits a lot of people. Through advertising, people also become aware of the price difference and quality in the market. This allows them to make good choices and not fall to scams.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of Essay On Advertisement

All in all, advertisements are very useful but they can also be damaging. Thus, it is upon us to use them with sense and ensure they are entertaining and educative. None of us can escape advertisements as we are already at this age. But, what we can do is use our intelligence for weeding out the bad ones and benefitting from the right ones.

FAQ on Essay On Advertisement

Question 1: What is the importance of advertisement in our life?

Answer 1: Advertising is the best way to communicate with customers. It helps informs the customers about the brands available in the market and the variety of products which can be useful to them.

Question 2: What are the advantages of advertising?

Answer 2: The advantages of advertising are that firstly, it introduces a new product in the market. Thus, it helps in expanding the market. As a result, sales also increase. Consumers become aware of and receive better quality products.

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Media and Advertising

Introduction.

Modern capitalist society would not function without advertising. It’s an effective way to promote products. People’s attitudes toward commercials are profoundly influenced by the media’s coverage of them in many forms, especially on television, radio, and the Internet. The growth of advertisements makes suppression difficult. People are continuously being exposed to commercials on their phones, in front of the TV, or in their cars. This essay focuses on how media affects consumers through advertising (Pandey et al.,2018). The paper will study how advertising can influence people’s perception of things, purchasing behavior, and views and values. This be done will be done by examining relevant ideas like cognitive dissonance and the simple exposure effect. This essay aims to provide an understanding of the relationship between media advertising and consumer behavior and how advertisement influences consumer behavior.

Claim 1: Advertising affects consumer behavior by creating awareness and interest in products or services.

Advertising is a crucial part of any successful advertising campaign. Companies can increase interest in their goods and services by spreading the word through advertising. For instance, a TV commercial for a new smartphone may arouse the interest of viewers who have never heard of the product. In addition, advertising can pique a consumer’s interest in a product by positioning it in a way that meets their wants and fulfills their dreams. Celebrity endorsements, for example, can boost an advertisement’s effectiveness and increase the target market’s interest. By increasing consumers’ interest levels, advertising can significantly impact buying decisions.

Advertising’s ability to raise product awareness has been shown to affect consumer behavior substantially. According to research, if you want to get people interested in your product, you need to have them thinking about buying it (Sama, 2019). Many examples are given to back up this argument, demonstrating the power of advertising campaigns to raise awareness of a brand and pique interest in a product’s potential buyers. Advertising may inspire consumers to take action, like making a purchase, by leaving a lasting impression of the company in their minds.

Claim 2: Advertising affects consumer behavior by shaping perceptions and attitudes towards products or services.

Advertising can profoundly influence consumers’ opinions and sentiments regarding a product or service. Marketers can target consumers’ wants by appealing to their emotions through commercials. A luxury car commercial, for instance, could influence a buyer’s opinion by portraying the vehicle as a symbol of power and prestige. Advertising can influence consumers’ perceptions of a product by linking it to a set of ideals. For instance, people who care about sustainability may respond positively to an ad for a product that helps the environment.

Research shows that commercials considerably impact how consumers feel about a given brand (Niazi et al., 2012). According to the study, consumers who saw positive ads had a more favorable impression of the goods. Nielsen also discovered that ads encouraging good citizenship affect consumers’ propensity to buy the advertised product.

Claim 3: Advertising affects consumer behavior by influencing purchasing decisions.

Consumers may be persuaded to act in a certain way because of commercials. Companies can educate customers and encourage informed purchase decisions by detailing the product’s characteristics, benefits, and cost in commercials. Ads that provide time-sensitive discounts or other incentives to buy can further encourage customers to act quickly. Ads can steer consumers in the direction of a certain product. Most of the time this sway the customer purchasing decisions.

Ads have been shown to have a considerable impact on customer behavior, particularly on purchase decisions. Advertising, for instance, can induce a sense of urgency and sway consumers to make a purchase (Pham et al., 2013).The study surveyed Indian consumers and discovered that persuasive advertising can sway consumer choice and ultimately result in a purchase. Advertising can sway a customer’s preference for one product over another by crafting an appealing message that speaks to their wants . Advertising’s ability to boost sales has a direct bearing on a company’s bottom line.

In conclusion, advertising is crucial in today’s capitalist society because of the impact it has on consumer decisions. Subsequently research has shown that effective advertising can be at drawing attention to and interest in a product or service. This in turn changes one’s opinion of that product or service leading to them buying it. Marketers can effectively influence consumers to buy by appealing to their specific desires through instilling a sense of urgency through the use of techniques like cognitive dissonance and the simple exposure effect. Ultimately, advertisements are essential to effective marketing strategies since they have a huge effect on consumers purchasing behavior.

Sama, R. (2019). Impact of media advertisements on consumer behaviour.  Journal of Creative Communications ,  14 (1), 54-68. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0973258618822624

Niazi, G. S. K., Siddiqui, J., Alishah, B., & Hunjra, A. I. (2012). Effective advertising and its influence on consumer buying behavior.  Information management and business review ,  4 (3), 114-119. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2130358

Pham, M. T., Geuens, M., & De Pelsmacker, P. (2013). The influence of ad-evoked feelings on brand evaluations: Empirical generalizations from consumer responses to more than 1000 TV commercials.  International Journal of Research in Marketing ,  30 (4), 383-394. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811613000499

Pandey, A., Sahu, R., & Dash, M. K. (2018). Social media marketing impact on the purchase intention of millennials.  International Journal of Business Information Systems ,  28 (2), 147-162. https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJBIS.2018.091861

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Chapter 11: Advertising Industry

61 The role of advertising in society

Advertising is the paid promotion that uses strategy and messaging about the benefits of a product or service to influence a target audience’s attitudes and/or behaviors. Between online, television, radio, and print platforms, the average American sees hundreds, even thousands of advertisements daily.

Although many consumers find them annoying, advertisements play a prominent role in shaping opinions about everything from products to politics. A Forbes article (2012) stated: “Advertising plays the same role in your media diet that vegetables play in your regular diet; most of us would prefer to skip that course and go straight to dessert. But, just like veggies, advertising plays an important role in sustaining a body; in this case, a diverse body of content” (para. 1). Advertising heavily supports many institutions, including news media outlets, the television industry, search engine companies, and social media websites. For example, advertising contributes up to 80 percent of revenue for newspapers and therefore is critical to maintaining the circulation of the press (Newspaper Association of America, 2014).

The advertising industry is also lucrative. According to eMarketer (2016), the United States spent approximately $190 billion on advertising in 2015. About a third of that figure went to television advertisements, and another third went to digital advertising. With its economic and cultural function in society, the advertising industry has an expansive reach.

Writing for Strategic Communication Industries Copyright © 2016 by Jasmine Roberts is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Essay Samples on Advertising

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Best topics on Advertising

1. The Role of Advertising in Society: Functions and Effects

2. Advantages and Disadvantages of Online Advertising: Navigating the Digital Marketplace

3. The Role That Consumer Behavior Plays on Advertising and Cancel Culture

4. Should Artists Music Be Used in Advertisements

5. Typography: From Billboards to Street Signs

6. Way of Struggling Brands and Advertising or Word-Of-Mouth

7. How Advertising Influences Consumer Behaviour

8. The Advertisement Analysis Of The Pears Soap

9. The Analysis Of Small World Machines Advertisement

10. That’s Nutellable’: An Analysis Of Advertisement Of Nutella

11. Analysis Of Comcast Advertisement, A Popular Ad

12. Advertisement Analysis: Analysing The Old Spice Ad

13. Ad Analysis Of The Allies, Hitler’s Campaign

14. The Semiotic Advertisement Analysis: Connotations And Denotations

15. Ad Analysis: The Objectification And Sexism In Original Red

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Chapter 6: 21st-century media and issues

6.3.4 Understanding advertising literacy (research essay)

English 102, november 2020.

In today’s society it has become an everyday thing to see commercials and advertisements because of all the technological advancements that have been made throughout the past few years. Speaking from personal experience, I see some sort of advertisement that is trying to persuade me to buy something almost every single day. I think almost everyone else can also agree that they see advertisements around them as well on a daily basis. Whether it is a sponsored ad on some sort of social media, such as Instagram, or it is a billboard that you see driving on the highway, businesses are constantly trying to persuade people to buy their products. Therefore, media literacy is in everyday activities even if someone does not realize it. This goes to show how important it is for people to have knowledge and understanding of what businesses are trying to persuade people to do with these advertisements. It is crucial for people to understand how advertisers communicate with the public. A specific question that has been researched and analyzed by social scientists is how do advertisers use persuasive techniques within advertisements to communicate with the public.

Speaking from personal experience of having to make a poster that advertised a show, I can relate to the advertiser and understand what needs to be incorporated into an advertisement in order to connect with the public. In high school I was in an AP Studio Art class. One of the directors from the Cincinnati School of Rock, who was friends with my high school art teacher, was interested in my work and wanted me to design a poster for one of their upcoming performances. The design of the poster had to be 80s themed, so I had to keep in mind that for the lettering of the writing had to be some sort of 80s looking font. I decided to draw the design for the poster and then transferred it onto the computer. When doing this I drew the design on paper with colored pencils and micron pens. Then I used a scanner to scan the picture and put it on the computer, where I changed the coloring, size, and placement of the design. I then had to think about how I was going to incorporate the writing on the poster. I hadn’t realized how many aspects of the writing that had to be taken into consideration when making the poster. I had to think about what type of font to use, the size of the letters, the placement of the information that needed to be on the poster, and of course what the poster needed to say. It was a very lengthy process of trial and error.

I had not realized how much literacy was involved in art and design and making something as simple as a poster. Once the design had been finished, I had to send it into the Cincinnati School of Rock so that they could print off multiple copies to hang up for their show. Seeing the finished product made me feel so accomplished. Surprisingly, most of my time making the poster was spent figuring out little details with the writing on it. This made me realize how many advertisements in the real world had to be made by taking literacy into account. Along with this, visuals in the media have to be made by designers that had to go through a similar process to what I did. The use of literacy is much more common in everyday life than I realized.

Many advertisements in the real world use strong persuasive techniques, and without media literacy someone walking through the city might get taken advantage of by an ad’s techniques. Someone might think that they are buying something that will be useful, but in reality, they might have just bought it because they liked how it looked. This is because of the visual appeal that the advertisement had for the viewer. For example, when walking through the city, people see advertisements that were made by designers that have literacy on them that try to persuade viewers to buy their products. Unknowingly, peoples’ everyday things involved in their lives have literacy. The advertisements are communicate with the viewer to do something or buy something. Along with this speaking from personal experience, I have bought a product purely based off of the advertisement. Scrolling through Instagram I see advertisements for things such as skin products and clothing. Recently I saw an advertisement for Curology and bought it based on the advertisement. They advertised it to be this amazing product that would help get rid of acne. Because of the advertisement and its visual appeal that it had for me, it caused me to be persuaded to buy it. These types of advertisements are everywhere and use different visuals and literacy to catch consumers’ attention. The art and design of these advertisements is communicating with the public.

Personally, I do not usually think about what goes behind the scenes of making an advertisement when I see one. However, after writing about literacy and exploring how it is involved in communication between businesses and the public, I have realized that it exists in almost everything. Along with this because I can relate to the designers that have to design the advertisements with my personal experience, I can see how much that I have to think about when making them. Even with the design of commercials and what they say in them uses literacy. There are words incorporated into the visual design and the meaning they are trying to present. Most of the time there are always words within an advertisement because they have to get their point across to whoever is looking at it. Another reason why media literacy is so important is because people can have more knowledge about what an advertisement is trying to sell them. With this knowledge people will not be taken advantage of by companies that try and sell their product, even if it is not actually how it appears in the advertisement. Overall, I have realized that literacy is a big part of the world and how it functions in everyday activities.

Because of the vast ever-changing world, businesses in the economy are constantly trying to make a profit and connect with the public by using commercials. There have been multiple studies that have been researched on how people are affected by commercials. Along with this it is important for people to understand the techniques that are used in commercials. One of them is targeting youth. Because of the fact that kids are still so innocent, and they have not developed critical thinking skills, yet it is easier for advertisers to persuade younger kids. They lack the knowledge to think for themselves and form their own opinions because of constant outside sources, trying to get them to think a certain way. A media literate person is able to recognize the purpose of the commercial that is being shown and the message that is addressed.

They are also able to tell what specific group the ad is trying to target and how the values in the advertisement are able to influence the viewer. Recognizing that children see many commercials on television in a day is important when understanding how they are also influenced by these advertisements that they see on a daily basis. Because advertisements are played so often children are shown to be able to recognize brand names and logos. This is what advertisers want to happen. This idea is shown through certain studies done on children to demonstrate their attitudes and thinking skills to have to do with commercials. For example, in a specific research study, that is discussed in the article “Teaching Media Literacy Skills About Commercials: A Comparative Analysis of Media Literacy Instruction,”, written by Christina Love, eighth grade kids’ attitudes, behaviors, and knowledge about commercials were studied (Love,3). Those who were taught media-related terms and did the activities that helped them be aware of certain things within media literacy were in the end able to recognize when commercials use selling techniques, target their specific audience, and use social values along with stereotypes (Love,4). Along with this as kids start to gain knowledge of advertising literacy, they are able to pick up on the techniques used by advertisers such as emotional appeal which causes them to have a connection with the advertisement (Love 13). Along with these adolescents lack interpretations of commercials, unlike adults. One of them being “conceptual advertising literacy,” which is how someone’s knowledge develops throughout their life due to the more experiences that they have (Hoek, Rozendaal, van Schie & Moniek 3). Adults have had many more experiences than a younger child has just because they are older and have had more opportunities in their life. Overall, children lack critical thinking skills to acknowledge how an advertisement is affecting them and the way that they feel or think about a certain thing.

Another technique used by advertisers that aim at younger kids is the overplaying of their commercials. With repetition of showing a certain product or advertisement, kids specifically are able to remember that commercial later on in their life due to long term memory and the constant exposure to it at such a young age.  Because advertisements are played so often children are shown to be able to recognize brand names and logos. This is what advertisers want to happen. Their goal is to overplay these advertisements repeatedly so that they can be easily memorized by the viewers (Love 15). Their hope of overplaying these advertisements is so that they can later remember them in their adult lives. All commercials are constructed very carefully and are played repeatedly so that they can be easily remembered and are able to target a specific audience (Love 16). Advertisers keep this technique in mind and is very common in the advertising industry. Along with this there are other ways that advertisers connect with the public that people should be aware of and have the knowledge about advertising literacy.

Another part of commercials that advertisers incorporate into the advertisements is indirect advertising. This is very common within targeting the teen population and even the young adult population. These types of advertisement aren’t as direct as a normal commercial may be. One of them being using video creators or other social media influencers, that young kids look up to and admire, to promote a product. Because of the large use of social media in today’s society, younger teens are often persuaded to follow these influencers. They are often seen as being “trendsetters” because of how popular they are (Sophia van Dam & Eva A. van Reijmersdal 1). These video influencers are sponsored by certain businesses to show off their brand and promote it. They are indirectly targeting teens to buy their product.

Today’s adolescents think that because this highly respected and valued person that they don’t even know is promoting a certain product that means that they should follow them and get that product. A lot of stores do this to promote their clotheslines. Viewers often perceive the influencers that they watch as their friends and develop an attachment to them (Sophia van Dam & Eva A. van Reijmersdal 3). The article “Insights in Adolescents’ Advertising Literacy, Perceptions and Responses Regarding Sponsored Influencer Veidos and Disclosures” discusses how in order to “empower adolescents and help them understand the persuasive nature of sponsored influencers videos” it is crucial for them to have an understanding of advertising literacy within the videos (Sophia van Dam & Eva A. van Reijmersdal 2). In the study that is discussed in the article the participants were shown a video of a popular influencer that was sponsored by Doritos to promote their brand (Sophia van Dam & Eva A. van Reijmersdal 6). After the video the participants’ attitudes and moral judgments were observed (Sophia van Dam & Eva A. van Reijmersdal 8). Overall, they found that with advertising literacy teens are able to form their own opinion on a brand rather than just following and automatically agreeing with a certain social media influencer that they look up to and admire.

With the indirect advertising this can play a huge mental role in teens. Because they constantly see video influencers showing off the newest trends, they feel obligated to buy or do what they are doing as well because it’s the “cool” thing to do. This is how advertisers take advantage of teens and younger adults because of the standards and obligations that society sets and affects how people feel and think about who they want to be like. Personally, I find myself doing this as well. Scrolling through Tik Tok I constantly see videos of people who are showing off a product that works well for them. I have bought a skin care product for my acne because it worked well for a random girl that I saw on Tik Tok. Along with this I have found myself buying clothes because I have seen other people wear the same thing in a video before and I thought it looked cute. As ridiculous as it sounds, social media and advertisements constantly control people’s lives and what they do with their lives. Not only are there indirect advertisements on social media, but there are many examples of direct as well. Speaking from personal experience scrolling through social media there will periodically be a sponsored advertisement that pops up on the page and is presenting a sale to the viewer trying to get them to buy a certain product. Overall, indirect and direct advertising is very prevalent in today’s society and people are exposed to it almost every day.

Going off of the idea that advertisers use persuasive techniques within advertisements to communicate to the public, it is not only relevant to the average person’s everyday life but also is relevant to big businesses and business owners. Along with this are the people that actually make the advertisements. They too must have an understanding of advertising literacy so that they know how to connect with the people that they are trying to sell their product to. Along with this, with advertising literacy they will be able to use the advertising techniques that are necessary within their advertisements. People who are actually making the advertisements need to have the knowledge and advertising literacy in order to best understand how to connect to their viewers or the people that they are trying to persuade (O’donohoe 9). There is a lot that goes into making an advertisement. From the words and phrases actually used that are addressing a meaning to the actual design of the advertisement that creates an emotional appeal to the viewer (Lapierre 6). Therefore, it is very important for not only the public eye to have an understanding of advertising literacy but also the people working for the businesses that are making advertisements.

Not only does advertising literacy affect those who are making advertisements and those who are viewing the advertisement, but it also impacts educators. People need to be taught about advertising literacy for life in the real world and the way to do this is for it to be taught in schools by educators. This goes to show that educators need to have advertising literacy in order to inform others about it (King 3). Speaking specifically of educators that this mostly impacts are librarians. Throughout the article, “Popular Sources, Advertising, and Information Literacy: What Librarians Need to Know”, the author talks about “native advertising” and how it is a pretty new form of advertising that has sponsors, fund articles and periodicals that then causes them to have control over the editorial process (King 7). It goes on to talk about how in the past this used to be unethical to allow advertisers to dictate the content of journalism (King 10). Overall, the essay talks about how important it is to understand how advertising impacts editorials that people use. This goes to show and explain why it is not only important for librarians and educators to teach students about advertising literacy for the real world but also for what they read in school as well.

Expanding more on the idea that advertising literacy affects children’s consumer behavior in the study discussed in the article, “Advertising Literacy and Executive Function: Testing Their Influence on Children’s Consumer Behavior”, the study is done in order to show how children’s consumer behavior is impacted by advertisements (Lapierre 3). They found that it is directly associated with consumer behavior (Lapierre 11). Along with this their advertising literacy was shown to have a negative relationship with the parents’ purchase requests (Lapierre 12). This evidence goes to show and explains how children’s consumer behavior is greatly impacted by advertisements. With advertising literacy, advertisements may not negatively impact children as much if they have the knowledge and are aware of what the advertisers are trying to get them to do. This way they can use their own critical thinking skills and form their own views and opinions in a smart and knowledgeable way.

Following up with this, another way children specifically can be greatly impacted on is through food advertisements. These types of advertisements can affect children’s health and what they eat on a daily basis. This can positively affect children, or it can affect them negatively depending on if the advertisement is promoting something healthy or unhealthy(Buttriss 4). This brings up the idea of banning the promotion of foods on children because of how most of the time it negatively impacts them and their health. Throughout the article, “Promotion of Foods to Children – to Ban or Not to Ban?”, it discusses the promotion of food presented to children and how it is characterized by many different types of viewpoints and opinions(Buttriss 5). One side believes that advertising to children should be banned or regulated because of its encouragement towards poor eating habits(Buttriss 3). Whereas on the other hand there are those that believe that companies can self-regulate their advertisements(Buttriss 3). Both sides relate to advertising literacy and either way having a knowledge of advertising literacy is important and applicable in both situations. Therefore, this goes to show how advertising literacy is an important concept that people need to be able to understand even if people have differing opinions on certain issues and topics that advertising literacy has to do with.

Throughout all of the research presented they seem to come to the conclusion that advertising literacy needs to be taught and understood by people because they are constantly surrounded by it in everyday situations. It is crucial for people to be informed and have an understanding of advertising literacy. Specifically, adolescents need to have an understanding of it because they are affected by the different techniques that advertisers use in their commercials in order to persuade them. Along with the research discussed, advertising literacy also relates to Gee’s “What is Literacy”. Gee talks about “discourses” and “identity kits”. These relate to advertising literacy because teens are their own “discourse” and are expected to act and think a certain way (Gee 14). Their “identity kit” impacts how they are supposed to dress within their “discourse” (Gee 14). Advertisements can take advantage of this by persuading them to buy their “cool” or “trendy” product. Gee also talks about “Secondary Discourses” (Gee 15). When teens are taught more about advertising literacy, they are acquiring the skill of how to recognize what the advertisement is trying to get them to do. Along with this within the “secondary discourse” they are able to see who the advertisers are trying to target with the techniques they use within their commercial or indirect advertisement. Therefore, it is important for not only the average everyday person to have advertising and media literacy in todays’ society, but also younger children because they are exposed to everyday advertisements that can affect the way they act and think.

The research overall goes to show that the techniques used by advertisers greatly impact the viewers. Whether it has to do with what it looks like to what the commercial is actually saying, commercials are constantly affecting humans mentally and trying to persuade them. Because this topic is relevant to almost everyone’s lives it is something that needs to be understood and taught to people in order to help them think critically for themselves. Personally, I don’t usually think about what goes behind the scenes of making an advertisement when I see one. However, after writing about literacy and exploring how it is involved in communication between businesses and the public, I have realized that it exists in almost everything. Along with this because I can relate to the designers that have to design the advertisements with my personal experience, I can see how much that I have to think about when making them. Even with the design of commercials and what they say in them uses literacy. There are words incorporated into the visual design and the meaning they are trying to present. Most of the time there are always words within an advertisement because they have to get their point across to whoever is looking at it. Another reason why advertising literacy is so important is because people can have more knowledge about what an advertisement is trying to sell them. With this knowledge people won’t be taken advantage of by companies that try and sell their product, even if it isn’t actually how it appears in the advertisement. Overall, I have realized that literacy is a big part of the world and how it functions in everyday activities.

An, Soontae, et al. “Children’s Advertising Literacy for Advergames: Perception of the Game as Advertising.”  Journal of Advertising , vol. 43, no. 1, 2014, pp. 63–72., doi:10.1080/00913367.2013.795123.

Buttriss, Judy, et al. “Promotion of Foods to Children – to Ban or Not to Ban?”  Nutrition Bulletin , vol. 28, no. 1, 2003, pp. 43–46., doi:10.1046/j.1467-3010.2003.00293.x.

Dam, Sophia Van, and Eva Van Reijmersdal. “Insights in Adolescents’ Advertising Literacy, Perceptions and Responses Regarding Sponsored Influencer Videos and Disclosures.”  Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace , vol. 13, no. 2, 2019, doi:10.5817/cp2019-2.

Hoek, Rhianne W., et al. “Development and Testing of the Advertising Literacy Activation Task: An Indirect Measurement Instrument for Children Aged 7-13 Years Old, Media Psychology.”  Media Psychology , doi:10.1080/15213269.2020.1817090.

King, Rachel P. “Popular Sources, Advertising, and Information Literacy: What Librarians Need to Know.”  The Reference Librarian , vol. 57, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–12., doi:10.1080/02763877.2015.1077772.

Lapierre, Matthew A. “Advertising Literacy and Executive Function: Testing Their Influence on Children’s Consumer Behavior.”  Media Psychology , vol. 22, no. 1, 2017, pp. 39–59., doi:10.1080/15213269.2017.1345638.

Love, Christa.  Teaching Media Literacy Skills about Commercials: a Comparative Analysis of Media Literacy Instruction . Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque Et Archives Canada, 2009.

O’donohoe, Stephanie, and Caroline Tynan. “Beyond Sophistication: Dimensions of Advertising Literacy.”  International Journal of Advertising , vol. 17, no. 4, 1998, pp. 467–482., doi:10.1080/02650487.1998.11104733.

Rozendaal, Esther, et al. “Reconsidering Advertising Literacy as a Defense Against Advertising Effects.”  Media Psychology , vol. 14, no. 4, 2011, pp. 333–354., doi:10.1080/15213269.2011.620540.

Zamel, Vivian.  Negotiating Academic Literacies: Teaching and Learning across Languages and Cultures . Routledge, 2017.

Understanding Literacy in Our Lives by Molly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Special Issue: Propaganda

This essay was published as part of the Special Issue “Propaganda Analysis Revisited”, guest-edited by Dr. A. J. Bauer (Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism and Creative Media, University of Alabama) and Dr. Anthony Nadler (Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Media Studies, Ursinus College).

Propaganda, misinformation, and histories of media techniques

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This essay argues that the recent scholarship on misinformation and fake news suffers from a lack of historical contextualization. The fact that misinformation scholarship has, by and large, failed to engage with the history of propaganda and with how propaganda has been studied by media and communication researchers is an empirical detriment to it, and serves to make the solutions and remedies to misinformation harder to articulate because the actual problem they are trying to solve is unclear.

School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds, UK

Introduction

Propaganda has a history and so does research on it. In other words, the mechanisms and methods through which media scholars have sought to understand propaganda—or misinformation, or disinformation, or fake news, or whatever you would like to call it—are themselves historically embedded and carry with them underlying notions of power and causality. To summarize the already quite truncated argument below, the larger conceptual frameworks for understanding information that is understood as “pernicious” in some way can be grouped into four large categories: studies of propaganda, the analysis of ideology and its relationship to culture, notions of conspiracy theory, and finally, concepts of misinformation and its impact. The fact that misinformation scholarship generally proceeds without acknowledging these theoretical frameworks is an empirical detriment to it and serves to make the solutions and remedies to misinformation harder to articulate because the actual problem to be solved is unclear. 

The following pages discuss each of these frameworks—propaganda, ideology, conspiracy, and misinformation—before returning to the stakes and implications of these arguments for future research on pernicious media content.

Propaganda and applied research

The most salient aspect of propaganda research is the fact that it is powerful in terms of resources while at the same time it is often intellectually derided, or at least regularly dismissed. Although there has been a left-wing tradition of propaganda research housed uneasily within the academy (Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Seldes & Seldes, 1943), this is not the primary way in which journalism or media messaging has been understood in many journalism schools or mainstream communications departments. This relates, of course, to the institutionalization of journalism and communication studies within the academic enterprise. Within this paradox, we see the greater paradox of communication research as both an applied and a disciplinary field. Propaganda is taken quite seriously by governments, the military, and the foreign service apparatus (Simpson, 1994); at the same time, it has occupied a tenuous conceptual place in most media studies and communications departments, with the dominant intellectual traditions embracing either a “limited effects” notion of what communication “does” or else more concerned with the more slippery concept of ideology (and on that, see more below). There is little doubt that the practical study of the power of messages and the field of communication research grew up together. Summarizing an initially revisionist line of research that has now become accepted within the historiography of the field, Nietzel notes that “from the very beginning, communication research was at least in part designed as an applied science, intended to deliver systematic knowledge that could be used for the business of government to the political authorities.” He adds, however, that

“this context also had its limits, for by the end of the decade, communication research had become established at American universities and lost much of its dependence on state funds. Furthermore, it had become increasingly clear that communication scientists could not necessarily deliver knowledge to the political authorities that could serve as a pattern for political acting (Simpson, 1994 pp. 88–89). From then on, politics and communication science parted ways. Many of the approaches and techniques which seemed innovative and even revolutionary in the 1940s and early 1950s, promising a magic key to managing propaganda activities and controlling public opinion, became routine fields of work, and institutions like the USIA carried out much of this kind of research themselves.” (Nietzel, 2016, p. 66)

It is important to note that this parting of ways did  not  mean that no one in the United States and the Soviet Union was studying propaganda. American government records document that, in inflation-adjusted terms, total funding for the United States Information Agency (USIA) rose from $1.2 billion in 1955 to $1.7 billion in 1999, shortly before its functions were absorbed into the United States Department of State. And this was dwarfed by Soviet spending, which spent more money jamming Western Radio transmissions alone than the United States did in its entire propaganda budget. Media effects research in the form of propaganda studies was a big and well-funded business. It was simply not treated as such within the traditional academy (Zollman, 2019). It is also important to note that this does not mean that no one in academia studies propaganda or the effect of government messages on willing or unwilling recipients, particularly in fields like health communication (also quite well-funded). These more academic studies, however, were tempered by the generally accepted fact that there existed no decontextualized, universal laws of communication that could render media messages easily useable by interested actors.

Ideology, economics, and false consciousness

If academics have been less interested than governments and health scientists in analyzing the role played by propaganda in the formation of public opinion, what has the academy worried about instead when it comes to the study of pernicious messages and their role in public life? Open dominant, deeply contested line of study has revolved around the concept of  ideology.  As defined by Raymond Williams in his wonderful  Keywords , ideology refers to an interlocking set of ideas, beliefs, concepts, or philosophical principles that are naturalized, taken for granted, or regarded as self-evident by various segments of society. Three controversial and interrelated principles then follow. First, ideology—particularly in its Marxist version—carries with it the implication that these ideas are somehow deceptive or disassociated from what actually exists. “Ideology is then abstract and false thought, in a sense directly related to the original conservative use but with the alternative—knowledge of real material conditions and relationships—differently stated” (Williams, 1976). Second, in all versions of Marxism, ideology is related to economic conditions in some fashion, with material reality, the economics of a situation, usually dominant and helping give birth to ideological precepts. In common Marxist terminology, this is usually described as the relationship between the base (economics and material conditions) and the superstructure (the realm of concepts, culture, and ideas). Third and finally, it is possible that different segments of society will have  different  ideologies, differences that are based in part on their position within the class structure of that society. 

Western Marxism in general (Anderson, 1976) and Antonio Gramsci in particular helped take these concepts and put them on the agenda of media and communications scholars by attaching more importance to “the superstructure” (and within it, media messages and cultural industries) than was the case in earlier Marxist thought. Journalism and “the media” thus play a major role in creating and maintaining ideology and thus perpetuating the deception that underlies ideological operations. In the study of the relationship between the media and ideology, “pernicious messages” obviously mean something different than they do in research on propaganda—a more structural, subtle, reinforcing, invisible, and materially dependent set of messages than is usually the case in propaganda analysis.  Perhaps most importantly, little research on media and communication understands ideology in terms of “discrete falsehoods and erroneous belief,” preferring to focus on processes of deep structural  misrecognition  that serves dominant economic interests (Corner, 2001, p. 526). This obviously marks a difference in emphasis as compared to most propaganda research. 

Much like in the study of propaganda, real-world developments have also had an impact on the academic analysis of media ideology. The collapse of communism in the 1980s and 1990s and the rise of neoliberal governance obviously has played a major role in these changes. Although only one amongst a great many debates about the status of ideology in a post-Marxist communications context, the exchange between Corner (2001, 2016) and Downey (2008; Downey et al., 2014) is useful for understanding how scholars have dealt with the relationship between large macro-economic and geopolitical changes in the world and fashions of research within the academy. Regardless of whether concepts of ideology are likely to return to fashion, any analysis of misinformation that is consonant with this tradition must keep in mind the relationship between class and culture, the outstanding and open question of “false consciousness,” and the key scholarly insight that ideological analysis is less concerned with false messages than it is with questions of structural misrecognition and the implications this might have for the maintenance of hegemony.

Postmodern conspiracy

Theorizing pernicious media content as a “conspiracy” theory is less common than either of the two perspectives discussed above. Certainly, conspiratorial media as an explanatory factor for political pathology has something of a post-Marxist (and indeed, postmodern) aura. Nevertheless, there was a period in the 1990s and early 2000s when some of the most interesting notions of conspiracy theories were analyzed in academic work, and it seems hard to deny that much of this literature would be relevant to the current emergence of the “QAnon” cult, the misinformation that is said to drive it, and other even more exotic notions of elites conspiring against the public. 

Frederic Jameson has penned remarks on conspiracy theory that represent the starting point for much current writing on the conspiratorial mindset, although an earlier and interrelated vein of scholarship can be found in the work of American writers such as Hofstadter (1964) and Rogin (1986). “Conspiracy is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age,” Jameson writes, “it is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system” (Jameson, 1991). If “postmodernism,” in Jameson’s terms, is marked by a skepticism toward metanarratives, then conspiracy theory is the only narrative system available to explain the various deformations of the capitalist system. As Horn and Rabinach put it:

“The broad interest taken by cultural studies in popular conspiracy theories mostly adopted Jameson’s view and regards them as the wrong answers to the right questions. Showing the symptoms of disorientation and loss of social transparency, conspiracy theorists are seen as the disenfranchised “poor in spirit,” who, for lack of a real understanding of the world they live in, come up with paranoid systems of world explanation.” (Horn & Rabinach, 2008)

Other thinkers, many of them operating from a perch within media studies and communications departments, have tried to take conspiracy theories more seriously (Bratich, 2008; Fenster, 2008; Pratt, 2003; Melley, 2008). The key question for all of these thinkers lies within the debate discussed in the previous section, the degree to which “real material interests” lie behind systems of ideological mystification and whether audiences themselves bear any responsibility for their own predicament. In general, writers sympathetic to Jameson have tended to maintain a Marxist perspective in which conspiracy represents a pastiche of hegemonic overthrow, thus rendering it just another form of ideological false consciousness. Theorists less taken with Marxist categories see conspiracy as an entirely rational (though incorrect) response to conditions of late modernity or even as potentially liberatory. Writers emphasizing that pernicious media content tends to fuel a conspiratorial mindset often emphasize the mediated aspects of information rather than the economics that lie behind these mediations. Both ideological analysis and academic writings on conspiracy theory argue that there is a gap between “what seems to be going on” and “what is actually going on,” and that this gap is maintained and widened by pernicious media messages. Research on ideology tends to see the purpose of pernicious media content as having an ultimately material source that is rooted in “real interests,” while research on conspiracies plays down these class aspects and questions whether any real interests exist that go beyond the exercise of political power.

The needs of informationally ill communities

The current thinking in misinformation studies owes something to all these approaches. But it owes an even more profound debt to two perspectives on information and journalism that emerged in the early 2000s, both of which are indebted to an “ecosystemic” perspective on information flows. One perspective sees information organizations and their audiences as approximating a natural ecosystem, in which different media providers contribute equally to the health of an information environment, which then leads to healthy citizens. The second perspective analyzes the flows of messages as they travel across an information environment, with messages becoming reshaped and distorted as they travel across an information network. 

Both of these perspectives owe a debt to the notion of the “informational citizen” that was popular around the turn of the century and that is best represented by the 2009 Knight Foundation report  The Information Needs of Communities  (Knight Foundation, 2009). This report pioneered the idea that communities were informational communities whose political health depended in large part on the quality of information these communities ingested. Additional reports by The Knight Foundation, the Pew Foundation, and this author (Anderson, 2010) looked at how messages circulated across these communities, and how their transformation impacted community health. 

It is a short step from these ecosystemic notions to a view of misinformation that sees it as a pollutant or even a virus (Anderson, 2020), one whose presence in a community turns it toward sickness or even political derangement. My argument here is that the current misinformation perspective owes less to its predecessors (with one key exception that I will discuss below) and more to concepts of information that were common at the turn of the century. The major difference between the concept of misinformation and earlier notions of informationally healthy citizens lies in the fact that the normative standard by which health is understood within information studies is crypto-normative. Where writings about journalism and ecosystemic health were openly liberal in nature and embraced notions of a rational, autonomous citizenry who just needed the right inputs in order to produce the right outputs, misinformation studies has a tendency to embrace liberal behavioralism without embracing a liberal political theory. What the political theory of misinformation studies is, in the end, deeply unclear.

I wrote earlier that misinformation studies owed more to notions of journalism from the turn of the century than it did to earlier traditions of theorizing. There is one exception to this, however. Misinformation studies, like propaganda analysis, is a radically de-structured notion of what information does. Buried within analysis of pernicious information there is

“A powerful cultural contradiction—the need to understand and explain social influence versus a rigid intolerance of the sociological and Marxist perspectives that could provide the theoretical basis for such an understanding. Brainwashing, after all, is ultimately a theory of ideology in the crude Marxian sense of “false consciousness.” Yet the concept of brainwashing was the brainchild of thinkers profoundly hostile to Marxism not only to its economic assumptions but also to its emphasis on structural, rather than individual, causality.” (Melley, 2008, p. 149)

For misinformation studies to grow in such a way that allows it to take its place among important academic theories of media and communication, several things must be done. The field needs to be more conscious of its own history, particularly its historical conceptual predecessors. It needs to more deeply interrogate its  informational-agentic  concept of what pernicious media content does, and perhaps find room in its arsenal for Marxist notions of hegemony or poststructuralist concepts of conspiracy. Finally, it needs to more openly advance its normative agenda, and indeed, take a normative position on what a good information environment would look like from the point of view of political theory. If this environment is a liberal one, so be it. But this position needs to be stated clearly.

Of course, misinformation studies need not worry about its academic bona fides at all. As the opening pages of this Commentary have shown, propaganda research was only briefly taken seriously as an important academic field. This did not stop it from being funded by the U.S. government to the tune of 1.5 billion dollars a year. While it is unlikely that media research will ever see that kind of investment again, at least by an American government, let’s not forget that geopolitical Great Power conflict has not disappeared in the four years that Donald Trump was the American president. Powerful state forces in Western society will have their own needs, and their own demands, for misinformation research. It is up to the scholarly community to decide how they will react to these temptations. 

• Mainstream Media
• / Propaganda

Cite this Essay

Anderson, C. W. (2021). Propaganda, misinformation, and histories of media techniques. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-64

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Anderson, C. W. (2020, August 10). Fake news is not a virus: On platforms and their effects. Communication Theory , 31 (1), 42–61. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaa008

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Corner, J. (2016). ‘Ideology’ and media research. Media, Culture & Society , 38 (2), 265 – 273. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443715610923

Downey, J. (2008). Recognition and renewal of ideology critique. In D. Hesmondhaigh & J. Toynbee (Eds.), The media and social theory (pp. 59–74). Routledge.

Downey, J., Titley, G., & Toynbee, J. (2014). Ideology critique: The challenge for media studies. Media, Culture & Society , 36 (6), 878–887. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443714536113

Fenster (2008). Conspiracy theories: Secrecy and power in American culture (Rev. ed.). University of Minnesota Press.

Herman, E., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Pantheon Books. 

Hofstadter, R. (1964, November). The paranoid style in American politics. Harper’s Magazine.

Horn, E., & Rabinach, A. (2008). Introduction. In E. Horn (Ed.), Dark powers: Conspiracies and conspiracy theory in history and literature (pp. 1–8), New German Critique , 35 (1). https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-2007-015

Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism . Duke University Press.

The Knight Foundation. (2009). Informing communities: Sustaining democracy in the digital age. https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Knight_Commission_Report_-_Informing_Communities.pdf

Melley, T. (2008). Brainwashed! Conspiracy theory and ideology in postwar United States. New German Critique , 35 (1), 145–164. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2007-023

Nietzel, B. (2016). Propaganda, psychological warfare and communication research in the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. History of the Human Sciences , 29 (4 – 5), 59–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695116667881

Pratt, R. (2003). Theorizing conspiracy. Theory and Society , 32 , 255–271. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023996501425

Rogin, M. P. (1986). The countersubversive tradition in American politics.  Berkeley Journal of Sociology,   31 , 1 –33. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41035372

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Simpson, C. (1994). Science of coercion: Communication research and psychological warfare, 1945–1960. Oxford University Press.

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Zollmann, F. (2019). Bringing propaganda back into news media studies. Critical Sociology , 45 (3), 329–345. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920517731134

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1.3 The Evolution of Media

Learning objectives.

• Identify four roles the media performs in our society.
• Recognize events that affected the adoption of mass media.
• Explain how different technological transitions have shaped media industries.

In 2010, Americans could turn on their television and find 24-hour news channels as well as music videos, nature documentaries, and reality shows about everything from hoarders to fashion models. That’s not to mention movies available on demand from cable providers or television and video available online for streaming or downloading. Half of U.S. households receive a daily newspaper, and the average person holds 1.9 magazine subscriptions (State of the Media, 2004) (Bilton, 2007). A University of California, San Diego study claimed that U.S. households consumed a total of approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008—the digital equivalent of a 7-foot high stack of books covering the entire United States—a 350 percent increase since 1980 (Ramsey, 2009). Americans are exposed to media in taxicabs and buses, in classrooms and doctors’ offices, on highways, and in airplanes. We can begin to orient ourselves in the information cloud through parsing what roles the media fills in society, examining its history in society, and looking at the way technological innovations have helped bring us to where we are today.

What Does Media Do for Us?

Media fulfills several basic roles in our society. One obvious role is entertainment. Media can act as a springboard for our imaginations, a source of fantasy, and an outlet for escapism. In the 19th century, Victorian readers disillusioned by the grimness of the Industrial Revolution found themselves drawn into fantastic worlds of fairies and other fictitious beings. In the first decade of the 21st century, American television viewers could peek in on a conflicted Texas high school football team in Friday Night Lights ; the violence-plagued drug trade in Baltimore in The Wire ; a 1960s-Manhattan ad agency in Mad Men ; or the last surviving band of humans in a distant, miserable future in Battlestar Galactica . Through bringing us stories of all kinds, media has the power to take us away from ourselves.

Media can also provide information and education. Information can come in many forms, and it may sometimes be difficult to separate from entertainment. Today, newspapers and news-oriented television and radio programs make available stories from across the globe, allowing readers or viewers in London to access voices and videos from Baghdad, Tokyo, or Buenos Aires. Books and magazines provide a more in-depth look at a wide range of subjects. The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has articles on topics from presidential nicknames to child prodigies to tongue twisters in various languages. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has posted free lecture notes, exams, and audio and video recordings of classes on its OpenCourseWare website, allowing anyone with an Internet connection access to world-class professors.

Another useful aspect of media is its ability to act as a public forum for the discussion of important issues. In newspapers or other periodicals, letters to the editor allow readers to respond to journalists or to voice their opinions on the issues of the day. These letters were an important part of U.S. newspapers even when the nation was a British colony, and they have served as a means of public discourse ever since. The Internet is a fundamentally democratic medium that allows everyone who can get online the ability to express their opinions through, for example, blogging or podcasting—though whether anyone will hear is another question.

Similarly, media can be used to monitor government, business, and other institutions. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle exposed the miserable conditions in the turn-of-the-century meatpacking industry; and in the early 1970s, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered evidence of the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up, which eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. But purveyors of mass media may be beholden to particular agendas because of political slant, advertising funds, or ideological bias, thus constraining their ability to act as a watchdog. The following are some of these agendas:

• Entertaining and providing an outlet for the imagination
• Educating and informing
• Serving as a public forum for the discussion of important issues
• Acting as a watchdog for government, business, and other institutions

It’s important to remember, though, that not all media are created equal. While some forms of mass communication are better suited to entertainment, others make more sense as a venue for spreading information. In terms of print media, books are durable and able to contain lots of information, but are relatively slow and expensive to produce; in contrast, newspapers are comparatively cheaper and quicker to create, making them a better medium for the quick turnover of daily news. Television provides vastly more visual information than radio and is more dynamic than a static printed page; it can also be used to broadcast live events to a nationwide audience, as in the annual State of the Union address given by the U.S. president. However, it is also a one-way medium—that is, it allows for very little direct person-to-person communication. In contrast, the Internet encourages public discussion of issues and allows nearly everyone who wants a voice to have one. However, the Internet is also largely unmoderated. Users may have to wade through thousands of inane comments or misinformed amateur opinions to find quality information.

The 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan took these ideas one step further, famously coining the phrase “ the medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964).” By this, McLuhan meant that every medium delivers information in a different way and that content is fundamentally shaped by the medium of transmission. For example, although television news has the advantage of offering video and live coverage, making a story come alive more vividly, it is also a faster-paced medium. That means more stories get covered in less depth. A story told on television will probably be flashier, less in-depth, and with less context than the same story covered in a monthly magazine; therefore, people who get the majority of their news from television may have a particular view of the world shaped not by the content of what they watch but its medium . Or, as computer scientist Alan Kay put it, “Each medium has a special way of representing ideas that emphasize particular ways of thinking and de-emphasize others (Kay, 1994).” Kay was writing in 1994, when the Internet was just transitioning from an academic research network to an open public system. A decade and a half later, with the Internet firmly ensconced in our daily lives, McLuhan’s intellectual descendants are the media analysts who claim that the Internet is making us better at associative thinking, or more democratic, or shallower. But McLuhan’s claims don’t leave much space for individual autonomy or resistance. In an essay about television’s effects on contemporary fiction, writer David Foster Wallace scoffed at the “reactionaries who regard TV as some malignancy visited on an innocent populace, sapping IQs and compromising SAT scores while we all sit there on ever fatter bottoms with little mesmerized spirals revolving in our eyes…. Treating television as evil is just as reductive and silly as treating it like a toaster with pictures (Wallace, 1997).” Nonetheless, media messages and technologies affect us in countless ways, some of which probably won’t be sorted out until long in the future.

A Brief History of Mass Media and Culture

Until Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of the movable type printing press, books were painstakingly handwritten and no two copies were exactly the same. The printing press made the mass production of print media possible. Not only was it much cheaper to produce written material, but new transportation technologies also made it easier for texts to reach a wide audience. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Gutenberg’s invention, which helped usher in massive cultural movements like the European Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. In 1810, another German printer, Friedrich Koenig, pushed media production even further when he essentially hooked the steam engine up to a printing press, enabling the industrialization of printed media. In 1800, a hand-operated printing press could produce about 480 pages per hour; Koenig’s machine more than doubled this rate. (By the 1930s, many printing presses could publish 3,000 pages an hour.)

This increased efficiency went hand in hand with the rise of the daily newspaper. The newspaper was the perfect medium for the increasingly urbanized Americans of the 19th century, who could no longer get their local news merely through gossip and word of mouth. These Americans were living in unfamiliar territory, and newspapers and other media helped them negotiate the rapidly changing world. The Industrial Revolution meant that some people had more leisure time and more money, and media helped them figure out how to spend both. Media theorist Benedict Anderson has argued that newspapers also helped forge a sense of national identity by treating readers across the country as part of one unified community (Anderson, 1991).

In the 1830s, the major daily newspapers faced a new threat from the rise of penny papers, which were low-priced broadsheets that served as a cheaper, more sensational daily news source. They favored news of murder and adventure over the dry political news of the day. While newspapers catered to a wealthier, more educated audience, the penny press attempted to reach a wide swath of readers through cheap prices and entertaining (often scandalous) stories. The penny press can be seen as the forerunner to today’s gossip-hungry tabloids.

The penny press appealed to readers’ desires for lurid tales of murder and scandal.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the first major nonprint form of mass media—radio—exploded in popularity. Radios, which were less expensive than telephones and widely available by the 1920s, had the unprecedented ability of allowing huge numbers of people to listen to the same event at the same time. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge’s preelection speech reached more than 20 million people. Radio was a boon for advertisers, who now had access to a large and captive audience. An early advertising consultant claimed that the early days of radio were “a glorious opportunity for the advertising man to spread his sales propaganda” because of “a countless audience, sympathetic, pleasure seeking, enthusiastic, curious, interested, approachable in the privacy of their homes (Briggs & Burke, 2005).” The reach of radio also meant that the medium was able to downplay regional differences and encourage a unified sense of the American lifestyle—a lifestyle that was increasingly driven and defined by consumer purchases. “Americans in the 1920s were the first to wear ready-made, exact-size clothing…to play electric phonographs, to use electric vacuum cleaners, to listen to commercial radio broadcasts, and to drink fresh orange juice year round (Mintz, 2007).” This boom in consumerism put its stamp on the 1920s and also helped contribute to the Great Depression of the 1930s (Library of Congress). The consumerist impulse drove production to unprecedented levels, but when the Depression began and consumer demand dropped dramatically, the surplus of production helped further deepen the economic crisis, as more goods were being produced than could be sold.

The post–World War II era in the United States was marked by prosperity, and by the introduction of a seductive new form of mass communication: television. In 1946, about 17,000 televisions existed in the United States; within 7 years, two-thirds of American households owned at least one set. As the United States’ gross national product (GNP) doubled in the 1950s, and again in the 1960s, the American home became firmly ensconced as a consumer unit; along with a television, the typical U.S. household owned a car and a house in the suburbs, all of which contributed to the nation’s thriving consumer-based economy (Briggs & Burke, 2005). Broadcast television was the dominant form of mass media, and the three major networks controlled more than 90 percent of the news programs, live events, and sitcoms viewed by Americans. Some social critics argued that television was fostering a homogenous, conformist culture by reinforcing ideas about what “normal” American life looked like. But television also contributed to the counterculture of the 1960s. The Vietnam War was the nation’s first televised military conflict, and nightly images of war footage and war protesters helped intensify the nation’s internal conflicts.

Broadcast technology, including radio and television, had such a hold on the American imagination that newspapers and other print media found themselves having to adapt to the new media landscape. Print media was more durable and easily archived, and it allowed users more flexibility in terms of time—once a person had purchased a magazine, he or she could read it whenever and wherever. Broadcast media, in contrast, usually aired programs on a fixed schedule, which allowed it to both provide a sense of immediacy and fleetingness. Until the advent of digital video recorders in the late 1990s, it was impossible to pause and rewind a live television broadcast.

The media world faced drastic changes once again in the 1980s and 1990s with the spread of cable television. During the early decades of television, viewers had a limited number of channels to choose from—one reason for the charges of homogeneity. In 1975, the three major networks accounted for 93 percent of all television viewing. By 2004, however, this share had dropped to 28.4 percent of total viewing, thanks to the spread of cable television. Cable providers allowed viewers a wide menu of choices, including channels specifically tailored to people who wanted to watch only golf, classic films, sermons, or videos of sharks. Still, until the mid-1990s, television was dominated by the three large networks. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, an attempt to foster competition by deregulating the industry, actually resulted in many mergers and buyouts that left most of the control of the broadcast spectrum in the hands of a few large corporations. In 2003, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) loosened regulation even further, allowing a single company to own 45 percent of a single market (up from 25 percent in 1982).

Technological Transitions Shape Media Industries

New media technologies both spring from and cause social changes. For this reason, it can be difficult to neatly sort the evolution of media into clear causes and effects. Did radio fuel the consumerist boom of the 1920s, or did the radio become wildly popular because it appealed to a society that was already exploring consumerist tendencies? Probably a little bit of both. Technological innovations such as the steam engine, electricity, wireless communication, and the Internet have all had lasting and significant effects on American culture. As media historians Asa Briggs and Peter Burke note, every crucial invention came with “a change in historical perspectives.” Electricity altered the way people thought about time because work and play were no longer dependent on the daily rhythms of sunrise and sunset; wireless communication collapsed distance; the Internet revolutionized the way we store and retrieve information.

The transatlantic telegraph cable made nearly instantaneous communication between the United States and Europe possible for the first time in 1858.

Amber Case – 1858 trans-Atlantic telegraph cable route – CC BY-NC 2.0.

The contemporary media age can trace its origins back to the electrical telegraph, patented in the United States by Samuel Morse in 1837. Thanks to the telegraph, communication was no longer linked to the physical transportation of messages; it didn’t matter whether a message needed to travel 5 or 500 miles. Suddenly, information from distant places was nearly as accessible as local news, as telegraph lines began to stretch across the globe, making their own kind of World Wide Web. In this way, the telegraph acted as the precursor to much of the technology that followed, including the telephone, radio, television, and Internet. When the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858, allowing nearly instantaneous communication from the United States to Europe, the London Times described it as “the greatest discovery since that of Columbus, a vast enlargement…given to the sphere of human activity.”

Not long afterward, wireless communication (which eventually led to the development of radio, television, and other broadcast media) emerged as an extension of telegraph technology. Although many 19th-century inventors, including Nikola Tesla, were involved in early wireless experiments, it was Italian-born Guglielmo Marconi who is recognized as the developer of the first practical wireless radio system. Many people were fascinated by this new invention. Early radio was used for military communication, but soon the technology entered the home. The burgeoning interest in radio inspired hundreds of applications for broadcasting licenses from newspapers and other news outlets, retail stores, schools, and even cities. In the 1920s, large media networks—including the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)—were launched, and they soon began to dominate the airwaves. In 1926, they owned 6.4 percent of U.S. broadcasting stations; by 1931, that number had risen to 30 percent.

Gone With the Wind defeated The Wizard of Oz to become the first color film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1939.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain; Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

In addition to the breakthroughs in audio broadcasting, inventors in the 1800s made significant advances in visual media. The 19th-century development of photographic technologies would lead to the later innovations of cinema and television. As with wireless technology, several inventors independently created a form of photography at the same time, among them the French inventors Joseph Niépce and Louis Daguerre and the British scientist William Henry Fox Talbot. In the United States, George Eastman developed the Kodak camera in 1888, anticipating that Americans would welcome an inexpensive, easy-to-use camera into their homes as they had with the radio and telephone. Moving pictures were first seen around the turn of the century, with the first U.S. projection-hall opening in Pittsburgh in 1905. By the 1920s, Hollywood had already created its first stars, most notably Charlie Chaplin; by the end of the 1930s, Americans were watching color films with full sound, including Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz .

Television—which consists of an image being converted to electrical impulses, transmitted through wires or radio waves, and then reconverted into images—existed before World War II, but gained mainstream popularity in the 1950s. In 1947, there were 178,000 television sets made in the United States; 5 years later, 15 million were made. Radio, cinema, and live theater declined because the new medium allowed viewers to be entertained with sound and moving pictures in their homes. In the United States, competing commercial stations (including the radio powerhouses of CBS and NBC) meant that commercial-driven programming dominated. In Great Britain, the government managed broadcasting through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Funding was driven by licensing fees instead of advertisements. In contrast to the U.S. system, the BBC strictly regulated the length and character of commercials that could be aired. However, U.S. television (and its increasingly powerful networks) still dominated. By the beginning of 1955, there were around 36 million television sets in the United States, but only 4.8 million in all of Europe. Important national events, broadcast live for the first time, were an impetus for consumers to buy sets so they could witness the spectacle; both England and Japan saw a boom in sales before important royal weddings in the 1950s.

In the 1960s, the concept of a useful portable computer was still a dream; huge mainframes were required to run a basic operating system.

In 1969, management consultant Peter Drucker predicted that the next major technological innovation would be an electronic appliance that would revolutionize the way people lived just as thoroughly as Thomas Edison’s light bulb had. This appliance would sell for less than a television set and be “capable of being plugged in wherever there is electricity and giving immediate access to all the information needed for school work from first grade through college.” Although Drucker may have underestimated the cost of this hypothetical machine, he was prescient about the effect these machines—personal computers—and the Internet would have on education, social relationships, and the culture at large. The inventions of random access memory (RAM) chips and microprocessors in the 1970s were important steps to the Internet age. As Briggs and Burke note, these advances meant that “hundreds of thousands of components could be carried on a microprocessor.” The reduction of many different kinds of content to digitally stored information meant that “print, film, recording, radio and television and all forms of telecommunications [were] now being thought of increasingly as part of one complex.” This process, also known as convergence, is a force that’s affecting media today.

Key Takeaways

Media fulfills several roles in society, including the following:

• entertaining and providing an outlet for the imagination,
• educating and informing,
• serving as a public forum for the discussion of important issues, and
• acting as a watchdog for government, business, and other institutions.
• Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press enabled the mass production of media, which was then industrialized by Friedrich Koenig in the early 1800s. These innovations led to the daily newspaper, which united the urbanized, industrialized populations of the 19th century.
• In the 20th century, radio allowed advertisers to reach a mass audience and helped spur the consumerism of the 1920s—and the Great Depression of the 1930s. After World War II, television boomed in the United States and abroad, though its concentration in the hands of three major networks led to accusations of homogenization. The spread of cable and subsequent deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s led to more channels, but not necessarily to more diverse ownership.
• Transitions from one technology to another have greatly affected the media industry, although it is difficult to say whether technology caused a cultural shift or resulted from it. The ability to make technology small and affordable enough to fit into the home is an important aspect of the popularization of new technologies.

Choose two different types of mass communication—radio shows, television broadcasts, Internet sites, newspaper advertisements, and so on—from two different kinds of media. Make a list of what role(s) each one fills, keeping in mind that much of what we see, hear, or read in the mass media has more than one aspect. Then, answer the following questions. Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph.

• To which of the four roles media plays in society do your selections correspond? Why did the creators of these particular messages present them in these particular ways and in these particular mediums?
• What events have shaped the adoption of the two kinds of media you selected?
• How have technological transitions shaped the industries involved in the two kinds of media you have selected?

Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism , (London: Verso, 1991).

Bilton, Jim. “The Loyalty Challenge: How Magazine Subscriptions Work,” In Circulation , January/February 2007.

Briggs and Burke, Social History of the Media .

Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005).

Kay, Alan. “The Infobahn Is Not the Answer,” Wired , May 1994.

Library of Congress, “Radio: A Consumer Product and a Producer of Consumption,” Coolidge-Consumerism Collection, http://lcweb2.loc.gov:8081/ammem/amrlhtml/inradio.html .

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man , (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

Mintz, Steven “The Jazz Age: The American 1920s: The Formation of Modern American Mass Culture,” Digital History , 2007, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?hhid=454 .

Ramsey, Doug. “UC San Diego Experts Calculate How Much Information Americans Consume” UC San Diego News Center, December 9, 2009, http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/12-09Information.asp .

State of the Media, project for Excellence in Journalism, The State of the News Media 2004 , http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2004/ .

Wallace, David Foster “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Little Brown, 1997).

Understanding Media and Culture Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Home — Essay Samples — Business — Media — Advertising Effects on American Culture

Advertising Effects on American Culture

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Published: Jun 6, 2024

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Table of contents

Introduction, body paragraph 1: consumerism driven by advertising, body paragraph 2: shaping social norms and values, body paragraph 3: psychological effects on individuals.

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Essay on Advertising Through Social Media

In today’s business world, social media is being discussed on a daily basis. This phenomenon has taken over the marketing and advertising industries and has changed the way they handle their efforts to attract customers. There is a big misunderstanding that social media are only popular networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, social media are “forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and micro blogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos).” The rise of these online communities has given companies an opportunity to engage in conversations with their customers. This in …show more content…

The combination of these social networking efforts resulted in approximately 2,000 Facebook fans and 15,000 views on YouTube. Within a couple of weeks Toyota experienced an increase in sales, especially in their Sienna model (Taylor, 258). Toyota is a clear example of a company facing both a financial and reputation crisis that with the help of social media was able to regain some of their lost sales as well as their trust amongst its costumers. Clearly social media can have a direct impact on consumer purchasing patterns, and it has increased the amount of online shopping for several companies. Authors Chung and Austria examine in their article Social Media Gratification and Attitude towards Social Media marketing Messages, the effect that this phenomenon has had on online shopping value: “According to the “2010 Social Media Report” from ForeSee results, 69% of online shoppers use social media. Fifty-six percent of shoppers indicate that they visit e-retail websites on a social networking site and that website visiting affects consumer purchase intention” (?). Costumers find it convenient to visit a company’s Website after seeing an ad in any popular social networking site. It requires minimal effort form the customer and it signifies an important portion of sales to a company. However, Social Media has not only had a positive financial impact on a company, but as it rapidly grows it has now

Prince Sports Case Study

The use of social media marketing has become a standard way in which organizations advertise their products or services. Social media marketing allows consumers to have immediate access to other consumers reviews or to post a review about a product or service. There is engagement between the company and the consumer (Evans, Dave 2010). Social Media emerged in the late 1980’s when websites such as Prodigy, Compuserve and America Online. Prodigy was first of it’s kind and was known as a ”consumer online service”. Half of the page is devoted to advertising. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Hi5, Bebo and Orkut are all social media platforms that are utilized as platforms today.

Speedster Athletics Case Study Essay

One of the key roles of social media from a marketing perspective is the development of a client based platform. It is becoming an increasingly important part of any business’s marketing. Businesses can utilize existing online platforms to build networks of current and potential clients. By being active online allows businesses to connect with their customers in innovative ways to become a trusted source of information and convey the passion they have for their industry.

Whole Foods Social Media Analysis

It is interesting how social media today is influencing the marketing role of many companies and how it’s playing a big role in their success. The more the company advertises on social media, the

Analytics of Wegmans’ Social Media Influence and Use of Twitter

Social media has become an essential channel for corporations to build a two-way relationship with their customers. However, having a social media account cannot solve everything. To make the best use of social media in keeping a positive relationship with their customers, corporations ought to seek and maintain influence among their followers in social media, and participate in communications with them.

The Effects of Social Media on Traditional Marketing and Advertising

Social media is not new. Facebook has been around since 2004, YouTube since 2005, and Twitter in 2006. What is new is how social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are affecting the way businesses market their products and services. Never before in our history have consumers been able to communicate so effortlessly with each other and with the businesses they frequent. Never before have businesses been able to interact and react to customer feedback so quickly and efficiently. However, just because businesses have the ability to use social media for their marketing and advertising efforts, does not necessarily mean they should. This paper intends to

Social Media As A Marketing Tool

The way that individuals and businesses communicate and interact has radically changed. With the development of technology and the internet, people can connect almost instantaneously and with very little effort. Social media has come to play a huge part in the way that the world communicates with each other. In fact, a recent report shows that in a single month people spend over 25 hours on social networks (“The Digital Consumer”). With consumers committing that much time to social media sites, social networking has become an important aspect of everyday life for individuals—and businesses. Like most marketing activities, social media marketing poses some risk. However, it is advantageous for businesses to exploit this opportunity, and develop an effective and ethical marketing strategy that includes using social media as a marketing tool.

Essay about Social Media Has Changed Marketing Forever

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Social media is an effective media of communication between the consumers and companies. The companies are using social media for improving consumer engagement and brand lift. This essay gives a brief overview of social media platforms and how effective they have been. It shows that the whole marketing concept has undergone radical transformation due to the social media interaction. The essay ends in conclusion depicting what marketers need to take care in order to have successful social media campaign.

Business and Social Media Essay

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We cannot deny how big of an impact social media has on our lives now, not only on people but businesses too. It has opened a whole new door to the business world and given them a big opportunity to interact and attract a larger amount of customers. It’s given us a new and faster way of communication by exchanging pictures, stories, news, blogs, online discussions, etc. In exchange businesses have benefited by a long shot just by the click of a button. With the help of the Internet a company no longer is dependent on a particular customer base to survive because now it can reach out to a worldwide audience within seconds. It’s imaginable the countless business attributes of all social media to this day and still is growing. Social media

Social Media Essay

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Based on the behavior of people who are using various social media sites, studies show that they interact with one other in a trusting and communal way and this simply proves the strength of digital interaction and the power of connection. The main issue that the marketing people face is that consumers are no longer satisfied with traditional advertising as the main source of product information, hence social media serves as the solution to this dilemma as this has become a community wherein consumers share their own direct experiences with various brands,

Deconstruction of Literature Matrix

In “An Examination of the Factors Influencing Consumers ' Attitudes Toward Social Media Marketing.?” Akar and Topcu point out that social media has become a phenomenon in marketing. (Akar and Topcu, 2011) Marketers are beginning to understand the use of social media as a component in their marketing and strategies and campaigns to reach out to customers. Promotions marketing intelligence, sentiment research, public relations, marketing communications, and product and customer

How Facebook Marketing Is Violating Consumer Privacy Essay

The marketing industry is an elaborate network that links companies to their consumers, primarily through written communication. The main objective of marketing is to identify trends and patterns in consumer behavior, and utilize the data to influence consumers to purchase more goods. From a macroenviroment standpoint, the general conditions of a market are heavily dependent on global environmental factors. The most significant factor that influences the markets today is technological advancements. Since the release of Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, and Myspace in the early 2000s, the number of people using social media has increased to over sixty-five percent. The ever-growing dependency on social media platforms, has given marketers the tremendous opportunity to further market potential consumers. Social media marketing is a specific form of marketing that focuses on producing ad content that social media users will post on their own networks. This particular marketing technique is effective because ads and content are created, based on what personal information users post on social media. Firms and organizations that advertise their brands on social media are more likely to increase their customer base and annual revenue. By doing so, companies are able to increase exposure of their brand and widen previous hidden, customer bases. As a marketer, the fine line between right and wrong is often blurred. The amount and

Argumentative Essay On Social Media

Social media has taken off like a rocket throughout the years. The annoying sound of a modem connecting has turned into a soundless transaction. The wait time to connect is instant, opening a global world of interactions for people. You can now connect with anyone, anywhere at anytime at least once a day. Social media defined by Goyal is “Any platform,which provides the facility of sharing ideas, exchanging information and sending messages over an electronic medium, is considered as social media.” (Goyal,222). This is to include online magazines, Facebook, Twitter, Newspapers,Email, Blogs, YouTube and many more. Advertisers have taken notice to these platforms, utilizing social media to promote their brands, develop trust with the consumer,save money and target audiences faster than ever before.

Evaluating Social Media Marketing

In light of this, this paper will discuss several reasons why social media marketing has become exceedingly popular among businesses of all sizes. It will also examine some benefits and pitfalls regarding business

The Impact Of Social Media On Business Essay

The purpose of this report is to show that even though some state that Social Media has fallen short of their expectations, it is actually good for business, given that it enhances the visibility of their brand and helps businesses stay connected to potential customers.

Literature Review On Social Media

Social media is defined as a group of Internet-based applications which build on the platform of Web 2.0 and the contents of these applications can be modified by all users in a participatory and collaborative method (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). Social media creates a platform for companies to talk to their customers as a hybrid element of promotion mix. With the emergence of social media, the tools and strategies for companies to connect with customers have also changed (Mangold and Faulds, 2009). To adapt with the emergence of social media in the marketing, companies should have unique insights about these significances (Quan-Haase and Young, 2010). The significances of social media embody three main aspects which are technology, decision-making and purchase behaviors of customers.

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Table of Contents

Which social media platforms are most common, who uses each social media platform, find out more, social media fact sheet.

Many Americans use social media to connect with one another, engage with news content, share information and entertain themselves. Explore the patterns and trends shaping the social media landscape.

To better understand Americans’ social media use, Pew Research Center surveyed 5,733 U.S. adults from May 19 to Sept. 5, 2023. Ipsos conducted this National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS) for the Center using address-based sampling and a multimode protocol that included both web and mail. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race and ethnicity, education and other categories.

Polls from 2000 to 2021 were conducted via phone. For more on this mode shift, read our Q&A.

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and  its methodology ­­­.

A note on terminology: Our May-September 2023 survey was already in the field when Twitter changed its name to “X.” The terms  Twitter  and  X  are both used in this report to refer to the same platform.

YouTube and Facebook are the most-widely used online platforms. About half of U.S. adults say they use Instagram, and smaller shares use sites or apps such as TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter (X) and BeReal.

Note: The vertical line indicates a change in mode. Polls from 2012-2021 were conducted via phone. In 2023, the poll was conducted via web and mail. For more details on this shift, please read our Q&A . Refer to the topline for more information on how question wording varied over the years. Pre-2018 data is not available for YouTube, Snapchat or WhatsApp; pre-2019 data is not available for Reddit; pre-2021 data is not available for TikTok; pre-2023 data is not available for BeReal. Respondents who did not give an answer are not shown.

Source: Surveys of U.S. adults conducted 2012-2023.

Usage of the major online platforms varies by factors such as age, gender and level of formal education.

% of U.S. adults who say they ever use __ by …

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Follow these links for more in-depth analysis of the impact of social media on American life.

• Americans’ Social Media Use  Jan. 31, 2024
• Americans’ Use of Mobile Technology and Home Broadband  Jan. 31 2024
• Q&A: How and why we’re changing the way we study tech adoption  Jan. 31, 2024

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Google’s A.I. Search Leaves Publishers Scrambling

Since Google overhauled its search engine, publishers have tried to assess the danger to their brittle business models while calling for government intervention.

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By Nico Grant and Katie Robertson

Nico Grant reports on Google from San Francisco and Katie Robertson reports on media from New York.

When Frank Pine searched Google for a link to a news article two months ago, he encountered paragraphs generated by artificial intelligence about the topic at the top of his results. To see what he wanted, he had to scroll past them.

That experience annoyed Mr. Pine, the executive editor of Media News Group and Tribune Publishing, which own 68 daily newspapers across the country. Now, those paragraphs scare him.

In May, Google announced that the A.I.-generated summaries, which compile content from news sites and blogs on the topic being searched, would be made available to everyone in the United States. And that change has Mr. Pine and many other publishing executives worried that the paragraphs pose a big danger to their brittle business model, by sharply reducing the amount of traffic to their sites from Google.

“It potentially chokes off the original creators of the content,” Mr. Pine said. The feature, AI Overviews, felt like another step toward generative A.I. replacing “the publications that they have cannibalized,” he added.

Media executives said in interviews that Google had left them in a vexing position. They want their sites listed in Google’s search results, which for some outlets can generate more than half of their traffic. But doing that means Google can use their content in AI Overviews summaries.

Publishers could also try to protect their content from Google by forbidding its web crawler from sharing any content snippets from their sites. But then their links would show up without any description, making people less likely to click.

Another alternative — refusing to be indexed by Google, and not appearing on its search engine at all — could be fatal to their business, they said.

“We can’t do that, at least for now,” said Renn Turiano, the head of product at Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper publisher.

Yet AI Overviews, he said, “is greatly detrimental to everyone apart from Google, but especially to consumers, smaller publishers and businesses large and small that use search results.”

Google said its search engine continued to send billions of visits to websites, providing value to publishers. The company has also said it has not showcased its A.I. summaries when it was clear that users were looking for news on current events.

Liz Reid, Google’s vice president of search, said in an interview before the introduction of AI Overviews that there were hopeful signs for publishers during testing.

“We do continue to see that people often do click on the links in AI Overviews and explore,” she said. “A website that appears in the AI Overview actually gets more traffic” than one with just a traditional blue link.

On Thursday afternoon, Ms. Reid wrote in a blog post that Google would limit AI Overviews to a smaller set of search results after it produced some high-profile errors , but added that the company was still committed to improving the system.

The A.I.-generated summaries are the latest area of tension between tech companies and publishers. The use of articles from news sites has also set off a legal fight over whether companies like OpenAI and Google violated copyright law by taking the content without permission to build their A.I. models.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to the training and servicing of A.I. systems. Seven newspapers owned by Media News Group and Tribune Publishing, including The Chicago Tribune, brought a similar suit against the same tech companies. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied any wrongdoing.

AI Overviews is Google’s latest attempt to catch up to rivals Microsoft and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, in the A.I. race.

More than a year ago, Microsoft put generative A.I. at the heart of its search engine, Bing. Google, afraid to mess with its cash cow, initially took a more cautious approach. But the company announced an aggressive rollout for the A.I. feature at its annual developer conference in mid-May: By the end of the year, more than a billion people would have access to the technology.

AI Overviews combine statements generated from A.I. models with snippets of content from live links across the web. The summaries often contain excerpts from multiple websites while citing sources, giving comprehensive answers without the user ever having to click to another page.

Since its debut, the tool has not always been able to differentiate between accurate articles and satirical posts. When it recommended that users put glue on pizza or eat rocks for a balanced diet, it caused a furor online.

Publishers said in interviews that it was too early to see a difference in traffic from Google since AI Overviews arrived. But the News/Media Alliance, a trade group of 2,000 newspapers, has sent a letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission urging the agencies to investigate Google’s “misappropriation” of news content and stop the company from rolling out AI Overviews.

Many publishers said the rollout underscored the need to develop direct relationships with readers, including getting more people to sign up for digital subscriptions and visit their sites and apps directly, and be less reliant on search engines.

Nicholas Thompson, the chief executive of The Atlantic, said his magazine was investing more in all the areas where it had a direct relationship to readers, such as email newsletters.

Newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Texas Tribune have turned to a marketing start-up, Subtext, that helps companies connect with subscribers and audiences through text messaging.

Mike Donoghue, Subtext’s chief executive, said media companies were no longer chasing the largest audiences, but were trying to keep their biggest fans engaged. The New York Post, one of his customers, lets readers exchange text messages with sports reporters on staff as an exclusive subscriber benefit.

Then there’s the dispute over copyright. It took an unexpected turn when OpenAI, which scraped news sites to build ChatGPT, started cutting deals with publishers. It said it would pay companies, including The Associated Press, The Atlantic and News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal, to access their content. But Google, whose ad technology helps publishers make money, has not yet signed similar deals. The internet giant has long resisted calls to compensate media companies for their content, arguing that such payments would undermine the nature of the open web.

“You can’t opt out of the future, and this is the future,” said Roger Lynch, the chief executive of Condé Nast, whose magazines include The New Yorker and Vogue. “I’m not disputing whether it will happen or whether it should happen, only that it should happen on terms that will protect creators.”

He said search remained “the lifeblood and majority of traffic” for publishers and suggested that the solution to their woes could come from Congress. He has asked lawmakers in Washington to clarify that the use of content for training A.I. is not “fair use” under existing copyright law and requires a licensing fee.

Mr. Thompson of The Atlantic, whose publication announced a deal with OpenAI on Wednesday, still wishes Google would pay publishers as well. While waiting, he said before the rollout of AI Overviews that despite industry concerns, The Atlantic wanted to be part of Google’s summaries “as much as possible.”

“We know traffic will go down as Google makes this transition,” he said, “but I think that being part of the new product will help us minimize how much it goes down.”

David McCabe contributed reporting.

Nico Grant is a technology reporter covering Google from San Francisco. Previously, he spent five years at Bloomberg News, where he focused on Google and cloud computing. More about Nico Grant

Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email:  [email protected]   More about Katie Robertson

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Federal regulators have reached a deal that allows them to proceed with antitrust investigations  into the dominant roles that Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia play in the A.I. industry.

Google appears to have rolled back its new A.I. Overviews  after the technology produced a litany of untruths and errors.

OpenAI said that it has begun training a new flagship A.I. model  that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT.

The Age of A.I.

After some trying years during which Mark Zuckerberg could do little right, many developers and technologists have embraced the Meta chief  as their champion of “open-source” A.I.

D’Youville University in Buffalo had an A.I. robot speak at its commencement . Not everyone was happy about it.

A new program, backed by Cornell Tech, M.I.T. and U.C.L.A., helps prepare lower-income, Latina and Black female computing majors  for A.I. careers.

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HADM 6491 Integrated Marketing Communications for the Hospitality Industry

Course description.

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025 .

This course delves into the dynamic field of marketing promotion in the hospitality industry. Building on theories and research from brand management, communications, consumer learning and information processing, and persuasion and attitude change, students will examine traditional promotions tools such as broadcast advertising, public relations, and direct marketing, as well as new digital media tools such as search and website marketing, content marketing, social media, influencer marketing, experiential marketing, digital-direct, and programmatic advertising. Students will demonstrate their emerging knowledge through quizzes and learning activities focused on the theories that guide marketing-communications strategy and practice, as well as the development of an integrated marketing communications plan for a hypothetical hotel company.

When Offered Fall.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: EMMH students.

Satisfies Requirement Elective.

• Possess knowledge of the core marketing-promotion approaches and their interaction with the brand and buyer depending on marketing objectives.
• Understand the key elements of persuasion that are used to influence consumers and how consumers learn from and make sense of marketing persuasion.
• Critically analyze IMC strategy and execution.
• Create IMC programs with results that are measurable.
• Select the appropriate media and messages for given communication objectives.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of emerging media in achieving marketing objectives.
• Identify ethical issues in marketing communications and how to make principled, responsible decisions for effective marketing within the global business environment.

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20558 HADM 6491   LEC 001

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• Aug 26 - Oct 24, 2024

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Kwortnik, R

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Media for Marketing and Advertising Essay

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Introduction

Grounds for premature termination, termination based on contractual claims.

A contract is an agreement that outlines specific details of an issue between different parties regarding a certain matter; it is usually a written document, although it can also be verbal and is enforceable in a court of law (Turner, 2008). When a contract has been broken a breach is said to have occurred; breach of contract in legal terms is used to describe actions that has been undertaken by one of the parties in contravention to the binding agreement as originally agreed between the parties. It is also used to describe situations where the terms of an agreement as entered between various parties is not honoured according to the articles of the agreement (Elias and Levinkind, 2005).

In this paper we are going to discuss two of the major ways that termination of a contract may be undertaken, namely premature termination of a contract and termination based on contractual claims. It is imperative that parties to a contract be aware of the circumstances under which a contract might be breached in general. Most of UK standard contracts dealing with engineering and construction projects have a range of provisions necessitating termination. In this paper we shall review one such form of contractual agreement that is routinely used by parties in the construction sector i.e. UK JCT building contract.

A contract that is prematurely terminated would normally be undertaken by the employer for a variety of reasons that has nothing to do with the nature of articles and provisions of the agreement (Murdoch and Hughes, 2008). Most forms of contract termination on this ground normally occurs under factors that are described as ‘termination for convenience” because the reasons for doing so are varied and can be undertaken at any time (Lavers, 2011).

This form of contract termination provides the employer with a lot of leeway in terms of reasons of doing so which makes it very essential to ensure such reasons are justifiable in order to maintain fairness in the event that a contract is cancelled on such grounds.

There are three grounds for termination covered by the UK JCT contract; one, when a contractor fails to rectify a structural fault within a period of 14 days after being notified to do so (Lavers, 2011). After the expiry of these 14 days the employer is justified to terminate the contract if the contractor had not rectified such faults by then and this will mean the contract has been prematurely terminated. Secondly, the employer may prematurely terminate the contract if there is evidence that the “contractor is insolvent” (Lavers, 2011).

Finally, early termination may be exercised by the employer if the employer becomes aware that the contractor might have broken laws pertaining to Prevention of Corruption Acts (Lavers, 2011). There also exist circumstances under which the contractor can terminate the contract prematurely such as when the employer fails to provide essential support financially or through materials necessary to ensure the work gets initiated.

In any of these events there is a well defined procedure that the employer or the contractor is expected to follow when intending to terminate the contract such as issue of notices, provision of grace period during which the contractor is given an opportunity to make right such wrongs and further issuance of final notice in writings that outlines the reasons for doing so. Most importantly it is essential that the employer be as objective as possible in doing so since such cases might have to be arbitrated in a tribunal where a contractor decides to contest the reasons of doing so.

This is termination of a contract that is undertaken based on breach of certain provisions of the agreement contrary to what was originally agreed between the parties and maybe exercised by any of the parties (Gibson Rigby and Tamsitt, 2005). The grounds of terminating contracts in this case will most often give rise to claims for damages usually in form of financial compensation and is normally referred as “termination for cause” (Lavers, 2011). In this case, most often the termination of the contract usually result from actions that amount to breach such as by omission or action that contravenes the provisions of the agreement either by the contractor or by the employer.

Unlike in the case of early termination of contract the procedure of terminating contract in this case becomes effective immediately once the breach has been determined to have occurred. Some of the grounds that can lead to immediate termination and give rise to contractual claims include failure by the contractor to obtain necessary documents on time such as bank guarantees, commencement certificate, availability certificate and suspension of work on site for more than “15 consecutive business days” (lavers, 2011).

In most of these circumstances compensation may be claimed by the employer as payment for inconveniency and delay. Consequently the contractor has recourse to terminate the contract and claim damages where the employer has breached the terms of the agreement such as by failing to make agreed payments, avail site of construction, delay commencement of work or hinder the contractor from discharging their duties (Lavers, 2011).

It’s thus imperative that the contract be detailed in such a manner that clearly states the expectations, obligations and terms of each party in the contract which must then be followed to the letter and in good faith. The contract should also clarify which form of remedy should be provided in case of breach of contract by any of the parties.

Elias, S & Levinkind, S. 2005. Legal Research: How to Find & Understand the Law . 14th ed. California: Berkeley.

Gibson, A., Rigby, S. and Tamsitt, G. 2005. Commercial Law: In Principle . 3rd edition, Sydney: Thomson Law Book Co.

Lavers, A. 2011. Early Termination by the Client in the Event of the Contractor’s Non-performance. A Paper given to the European Society of Construction Law in Amsterdam . Society of Construction Law.

Murdoch, J and Hughes, W. 2008. Construction contracts: law and management . London: Taylor & Francis.

Turner, C. 2008. Australian Commercial Law , 27th edn. Victoria: Thomson Reuters.

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IvyPanda. (2022, March 26). Media for Marketing and Advertising. https://ivypanda.com/essays/media-for-marketing-and-advertising/

"Media for Marketing and Advertising." IvyPanda , 26 Mar. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/media-for-marketing-and-advertising/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Media for Marketing and Advertising'. 26 March.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Media for Marketing and Advertising." March 26, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/media-for-marketing-and-advertising/.

1. IvyPanda . "Media for Marketing and Advertising." March 26, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/media-for-marketing-and-advertising/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Media for Marketing and Advertising." March 26, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/media-for-marketing-and-advertising/.