Everyone, everywhere, anytime. A normal person, who lives in a huge city like Vienna, is y a „victim“ of advertising many times a day. On the way to school, to work, while relaxing in front of the television; isn’t that shocking? Advertising is the process of attracting the public, especially by paid announcements. It is the medium to make customers aware of a product or service. For example, you might invent and produce the greatest toy in the world but how would anyone know something about it unless you told him? A lot of unknown companies could only grow up so fast and successfully, because they used the internet or other medias to present (advertising) their product in the whole world. „Sex sells“ is one of the most famous quotations related to this topic.
But, is this really true? Do we really need so much advertising with half naked models in front of it? Wouldn’t it more convincing, if the ad would inform the consumers about the product than praise it with any kind of sex. I don’t even think the Internet would exist the way it does nowadays, if there were not so much advertising. The World Wide Web represents the largest and cheapest way to reach a huge crowd of people.
I completely agree with the quotation, that our environment is overfilled with advertisement posters and jingles. But the thing that annoys me more than the quantity of advertising is the way they do it. I really hate the most of these stupid television commercials. In some cases I would not refrain from buying a product because of its quality or price, but rather because of the way it was advertised.
In spite of the fact that advertising can be very annoying – for example interrupting an exciting movie or popping-up over the website – I would say, that advertising is very important for our life and society because it „can“ transmit important informations about new products or services. And I can imagine that in the future there will be more ads, because the technology to present products will be more advanced. But my opinion is, that the consumers should be able to regulate the advertising given to them. For example, by blocking the ads in the internet or disabling the interruption in movies.