What is the publicity?
It’s hard to find a satisfying marketing definition.
A quaint way of saying it is to call it commercial imagination, an imagination that sees possibilities in a product that can only be realized by engaging the public in new ways to create desire where none existed before. It’s a very broad word, an omnibus word that conveys different ideas to different people.
No definition of advertising is possible here, except that this entire article can be accepted as a definition. Advertising has moved so rapidly through its various changes that even the latest dictionaries and encyclopedias are out of date in their attempts to define it. Yesterday’s advertising is not today’s advertising. Men not so old have witnessed its entire development from an unreliable instrument of charlatans to its place as an engine in the conduct and expansion of business.
Advertising in the dictionary sense has a history as old as the human race. As soon as there were enough people in the world, some sort of formal announcement had to be made. The early history of such advertisements, from the proclamations to the beginning of pictorial and lettered inscriptions, from these early billboards to the discovery of the printing press, and from the advent of the printing press to the beginning of actual advertising, is of interest. Just for the archaeologist. It has no value to the business entrepreneur. It would be no help to understand modern publicity than ancient Phoenician coins would be to understand the principles of a modern bank.
Any attempt to secure the sale of a product or service is advertising. The primitive merchant’s merchandise displayed enticingly in front of his stall is advertising. A want ad, to secure a job or an employee, is advertising. An inscription on a wall, the barker in front of a side show, the promises of an Internet marketer, the announcement of a new online technology, membership in an affiliate program, the use of a quirky shirt or a distinctive sticker on Your car: These are all forms of advertising that seek to draw attention to a product or service that is for sale. For a general purpose product or service, it must appeal to rich and poor, high and low, men, women and even children.
At least one principle that we know remains constant, it does not erode with the passage of time or the use and/or abuse of men, it does not care about the outside weather, nor does it consider your personal health status, nor does it take into account the circumstances that surround it, and that is, you have to keep doing it, you have to feed it, there is no way around it, keep asking for every ounce of your commitment if you expect any kind of visible return.
Whatever the appropriate definition of advertising, it is one thing to conclude, it is because it has been. And every successive year since the beginning of mankind entrepreneurship it has left behind its precious storehouse of new ideas, better methods, greater and faster efficiencies, and the promise of even greater growth.
