Advertisements

We are surrounded by advertisements – in newspapers and magazines, on television, on hoardings (billboards – AmE). People advertise for the things they want to buy, and the things they want to sell. Big companies advertise goods and services making advertising a huge industry with vast amounts of money being spent on it.

Many English newspapers have pages with advertisements on them. Newspaper advertising is divided into two types, display and classified. In the advertisements of the ‘display’ type, ranging from one-inch notices to multiple-page public announcements, big companies advertise their products. They persuade the public to buy them or use them. ‘Classified’ advertisements (also ‘small ads’ – BrE, or ‘want ads’ – AmE) are the small print personal notices or advertisements placed in a newspaper by a company offering employment, advertising for apartments, for rent, used furniture or automobiles.

An advertisement which uses a lot of space costs more money than one which uses a little space. So people try to make their messages as short as possible. They shorten the words and use abbreviations. For example, they put ‘rm’ instead of ‘room’, and ‘£250 pm’ instead of ‘£250 a month/ per month’. Here is a list of abbreviations which you can find in ‘classified’ advertisements for flats and houses.

It is well known that advertising absorbs vast sums of money because it is an entirely unproductive industry and it increases the price of advertised goods and services. But advertising is not sheer waste of money. It has a lot of advantages. For instance it is precisely because of the heavy advertising that consumer goods are so cheap. Another equally important function of advertising is to inform. Advertisements introduce us to new products or remind us of the existence of ones we already know about. Supposing you wanted to buy a washing machine, it is more likely you would obtain details regarding performance, price, etc. from an advertisement. The fact that we pay so little for our daily paper, or can enjoy so many television programmes is due entirely to the money spent by advertisers. However, many people think that advertising has some disadvantages. Advertisements on television, for example, present shocking interruption of programmes. Advertising creates acquisitive society with the demand for material things. Besides, good-quality products don’t need to be advertised.

Most companies recruit new staff by advertising in the press. Pages with job advertisements are usually headed ‘appointments’. They contain descriptions or specifications of the sort of people the advertiser is looking for. Qualifications (degrees, diplomas, certificates) are obviously important, but experience may count for much more. The aim is to attract a small number of well-qualified applicants, so that it is fairly easy to make a short-list of the people one actually wants to interview. If the advertisement is not specific enough, hundreds of people will send in their applications; but if it demands too much, they may be discouraged from applying at all.

NOTES