Billboards, signs, radios, newspapers, television, and internet are main instruments that we as society see or use everyday and advertisers use as channels to advertise to society. Advertising has a major role in businesses and advertising is a business in itself. How else would businesses get their name and product or service out to the consumer by efficient means and time? A business may create a product and within a couple days reach consumers across the nation to sell that product. Without advertising businesses would not expand into nationwide companies, they would only exist as bricks and mortars in towns where they exist and the community knows them. Without advertising competition would only exist between companies by positive feedback of consumers and their price. Without advertising our society would move at a snails pace to grow. Spending would be minimal as well as sales. Advertising creates more business to be done and more spending to be done. Furthermore, advertising is a paid link between the business and the consumer to inform and persuade them about a product or service to promote consumer sovereignty of products available to the consumer.
To understand the disputes and arguments of advertising, the definition of advertising has to be established. Advertising happens to be anything that distributes a message to another to inform or persuade. A garage sale sign pinned on a tree is a form of advertising. But to keep it from a business standpoint, advertisements are "paid, nonpersonal communication forms used with persuasive intent by identified sources through various media" (Commerce and Morality p43). In order to make advertising unique from announcements and other types of information, advertising main purpose is to inform and persua ...