How does advertising work?

One of the most common questions related to this industry is "How does advertising work?" There is much evidence that advertising works on a whole variety of people in surprisingly immediate ways and although advertisements are ephemeral in that each one is short-lived, their effects are longstanding and cumulative; the most important thing here is that they leave traces of themselves behind, which combine to form a body of messages about the culture that produced them. This is a start in explaining how advertising works. These messages can then function both to reflect and to construct cultural values. Thus, advertisements are forms of discourse, which make a powerful contribution to how we construct our identities. At the same time, for adverts to work, they must use our commonly shared resources of language in ways that affect us and mean something to us.

For many years there has been considerable debate about how advertising works. The consensus is that there can be no single all-embracing theory that explains how all advertising works because it has varied tasks. For example, advertising that attempts to make an instant sale by incorporating a return coupon which can be used to order a product is very different from corporate image advertising that is designed to reinforce attitudes.

The competing views on how advertising works have been called the strong and the weak theories of advertising. To learn more about how does advertising work please see our other articles.