• by Staff Writers , February 27, 2007

It's as good a time as any to return to the origins of advertising. Media takes a look at the definition of advertising as advanced in the book: The Economic Effects of Advertising by Harvard professor Neil H. Borden. This seminal book was published in 1942. It represented the culmination of a series of academic research studies that were begun in the 1930s and were funded by Anna Erickson, widow of one of the founders of McCann-Erickson.

"Advertising includes those activities by which visual or oral messages are addressed to the public for the purposes of informing them and influencing them either to buy merchandise or services or to act or be inclined favorably toward ideas, institutions, or persons featured. As contrasted with publicity and other forms of propaganda, advertising messages are identified with the advertiser either by signature or by oral statement. In further contrast to publicity, advertising is a commercial transaction involving pay to publishers or broadcasters and others whose media are employed.

"Activities sometimes termed advertising but which in this study are placed under other classifications of sales promotional effort include the offering of premiums to stimulate the sale of products; the use of exhibitions and demonstrations at fairs, shows, and conventions; the use of samples; and the so-called publicity activities involved in sending out news releases. Likewise arbitrarily excluded from the category of advertising are the activities of personal selling forces, both regular and missionary salesmen; offering of free goods; the payment of advertising allowances which are not used for advertising; the entertainment of customers; the conducting of demonstration stores; and the giving of the bonuses or PM's to salesmen of the trade."