Advertising keeps the media alive. In an earlier era, print and TV survived on advertising. Of late, web sites and mobile apps survive on it.

Vance Packard’s book Hidden Persuaders in 1957 painted advertising in sinister light. He contended that psychology and sociology are used by advertising industry to persuade the average citizen to buy and get addicted to products that she did not really need. Some later books wondered whether advertising works at all. The End of Advertising as We Know It by Sergio Zyman in 2002 made a case that in this millennium advertising have become self-indulgent, and consequently the art and entertainment aspects have been overemphasised, rather than the ability to sell a product. Al Ries and Laura Ries wrote in 2002 The Fall of Advertising and The Rise of PR. Here they question the power of print ads and TVCs. They cite the examples Starbucks, The Body Shop, Walmart, Red Bull and Zara which have built up their brands without advertising. They conclude that marketers should relax on unpaid PR which persuade journalists to write favourably about their products and the values they stand for.

Advertising emerged in the US in the 1950s owing to a need for differentiation among  several commodity type of products. In the 1970s, as the colour printing presses became cheap, there was a magazine boom, which capitvated both the readers and advertisers. Satelite TV through cable at our homes led to another stimulation to advertising and boosted regional advertising too. The earlier formats struggled to survive, as new formats replaced them during this journey, e.g. early magazine ads looked like newspaper ads and early TV commercials looked like cinema ads. When Internet came on the scene, it adopted the outdoor ad format for the first five years, and called it banner ads. Later search engines thought of putting up ads corresponding to those subjects which we were searching. The innovation brought in was the offer that pay only when someone clicks the ad. It copied the format of direct marketing ads of 1950s i.e. action-proneness. Advertising adopted the maxim that it has to be performance-driven. It is now time to seek a suitable format for mobile ads, which finds that some videos are too loud and intrusive for the privacy of this user, and for offering him personalisation.