Advertising and Marketing Communication I: Definition, Concept, Functions, Types and Evolution of Advertising; Standards and Ethics; Theories and Models of Communication in Advertising; Brand Management; and Advertising Management, the Agency, the Client and Media Planning and Budgeting

Advertising is as old as trade: shop signs and town criers served ancient and medieval markets. Printing made it a medium: William Caxton's handbill of 1477, advertising a book, is often cited as the first printed advertisement in English. Newspapers carried notices from the seventeenth century, and the Industrial Revolution, with branded, packaged goods sold nationally, made advertising an industry. Volney Palmer opened what is usually called the first advertising agency in Philadelphia in the 1840s, selling newspaper space; N. W. Ayer and Son (1869) introduced the open contract and moved agencies towards serving advertisers rather than papers. Radio, television and then the internet each reorganised the business around a new medium.

In India, Hicky's Bengal Gazette (1780) was also called the Calcutta General Advertiser and carried notices; B. Datram and Company (1905) is often named as the first Indian-owned agency; J. Walter Thompson opened in India in 1929 and later became Hindustan Thompson Associates; Lintas, Lever International Advertising Services, began in 1939 as Hindustan Lever's in-house agency. Advertising reached radio on Vividh Bharati in 1967 and Doordarshan in 1976, and grew fastest after 1991. The Amul girl, created in 1966 by the agency daCunha, remains the country's longest-running topical campaign, and Indian creative leaders such as Alyque Padamsee, Piyush Pandey and Prasoon Joshi made advertising in Indian idiom a craft of its own.

Standards in India rest on self-regulation backed by law. The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), a voluntary body set up in 1985 by advertisers, agencies and media, administers a Code whose four principles require advertisements to be truthful and honest, not offensive to generally accepted standards of public decency, not to encourage harmful products or situations, and to be fair in competition. Complaints are decided by its Consumer Complaints Council, and ASCI issued guidelines for influencer advertising in 2021. The law adds teeth: the Consumer Protection Act 2019 created the Central Consumer Protection Authority, which can penalise misleading advertisements and their endorsers; the Cable Television Networks Rules' Advertising Code governs television; and specific statutes such as the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act 1954, taught in Chapter 14, forbid particular claims.

Hierarchy-of-effects models assume that a consumer moves through stages from awareness to action, and that advertising's task at each stage differs. AIDA, attributed to E. St. Elmo Lewis (1898), runs attention, interest, desire, action. Robert Lavidge and Gary Steiner (1961) proposed awareness, knowledge, liking, preference, conviction and purchase, grouped into cognitive, affective and conative stages, the think-feel-do sequence. Russell Colley's Defining Advertising Goals for Measured Advertising Results (1961), known as DAGMAR, argued that advertising objectives should be communication objectives, measurable against a defined audience and time, through awareness, comprehension, conviction and action.

Critical approaches read advertising as a system of meaning. Following Roland Barthes, Judith Williamson's Decoding Advertisements (1978) argued that advertisements transfer meanings from signs the audience already values, such as a film star, a landscape or a family scene, onto products, and invite the viewer to complete the meaning, so that we buy an identity as well as an object. This semiotic reading explains why the same product can be sold with very different images in different cultures.

A brand, in the American Marketing Association's definition, is a name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller and differentiate them from competitors. Brand management is the long-term building and protection of what that name means to people. Brand equity is the value a brand adds to a product. David Aaker's Managing Brand Equity (1991) named five components: brand loyalty, brand awareness, perceived quality, brand associations, and other proprietary brand assets such as patents and trademarks. Kevin Lane Keller's customer-based brand equity pyramid builds from salience, through performance and imagery, and judgements and feelings, to resonance, the deep loyalty at the top.

• Brand identity is how the owner wants the brand to be seen; brand image is how consumers actually see it. Jean-Noël Kapferer's identity prism has six facets: physique, personality, culture, relationship, reflection and self-image.
• Brand personality gives a brand human traits; Jennifer Aaker (1997) found five dimensions: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness.
• Line extension adds variants in the same category (a new flavour); brand extension takes the name into a new category (a soap brand launching shampoo).
• Brand architecture is either a branded house, one master brand across products, or a house of brands, many separately named brands under one company.

An advertising agency plans, creates, produces and places advertising for clients. A full-service agency offers everything; a creative boutique offers creative work only; a media agency or media independent plans and buys media; specialised agencies handle digital, healthcare, rural or recruitment advertising; and some advertisers keep an in-house agency. In a full-service agency, account management (client servicing) is the link with the client and manages the business; account planning brings consumer insight into strategy; the creative department, copywriters and art directors in pairs under a creative director, makes the advertisements; the media department plans and buys space and time; production turns approved ideas into finished work; and traffic keeps jobs moving to deadlines.

Agencies were traditionally paid a commission, conventionally 15 per cent of media billings, allowed by the media on space and time bought through them. Today fees, retainers and performance-linked payment are common. The client-agency relationship begins with a pitch, in which competing agencies present ideas, and runs on the brief, the client's statement of objectives, audience, message and budget. Conflicts arise over creative control, payment and, above all, account conflict: an agency usually cannot handle two competing brands in the same category.

Media planning decides where, when and how often advertising will appear so as to reach the target audience efficiently. Reach is the percentage of the target audience exposed at least once in a period; frequency is the average number of exposures among those reached; gross rating points (GRPs) are reach multiplied by average frequency, so 60 per cent reach at an average frequency of 4 gives 240 GRPs. Cost per thousand (CPM) is the cost of reaching one thousand people, calculated as cost divided by audience and multiplied by 1,000. Print space is sold by the column-centimetre: an advertisement 4 columns wide and 12 centimetres deep occupies 48 column-centimetres, and at 450 rupees per column-centimetre costs 21,600 rupees. Television audiences in India are measured by the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), whose ratings began in 2015, and print circulation is audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Scheduling patterns are continuity (a steady level throughout), flighting (bursts of advertising alternating with periods of none) and pulsing (a continuous low level with periodic bursts, as for a product with steady sales and seasonal peaks). Budgets are set by the percentage-of-sales method (a fixed share of past or expected sales), the affordable method (what is left after other costs), competitive parity (matching competitors' spending or share of voice), or the objective-and-task method, which costs the tasks needed to reach defined objectives and is the most logical because it starts from what advertising must achieve. Television advertising time is capped: the Cable Television Networks Rules limit advertisements to 12 minutes in a clock hour.