Advertising and popular culture — страница 2

Nationally, it generates over $5 trillion in economic activity, or approximately 20 percent of U.S. total economic activity. Sales of products and services stimulated by advertising support 21 million jobs, or 15 percent of the total jobs in the country. In addition, another Nobel Laureate in economics, George Stigler, also has noted that advertising is a critical force in fostering economic efficiency and competition throughout the US economy. Advertising enables consumers to enjoy a vast array of media choices. Commercial television and radio are available to the public at no cost, thanks to advertising. In addition, advertising revenues provide substantial support for most print publications, large portions of the Internet and cable, giving people access to immense information

and entertainment content at little cost. This support helps democratize access to information. The public, wherever they are located geographically and regardless of their income level, have more information available to them than at any other time in history. Advertising informs consumers about product choices available in the marketplace. Increasingly, it also educates them about issues that affect their lives. Recognizing the power of advertising to educate, the industry annually voluntarily devotes multi-billions of dollars worth of creative and media resources to high-visibility public service campaigns. Vast, affordable media options enrich our society and underpin a core American value: the democratization of knowledge and information. Advertising plays a critical role in

fostering this abundance of information, as it provides the financial foundation for the immense number of media and Web services available to U.S. consumers. Commercial broadcasting, both radio and television, is supported solely by revenues from the sale of advertising time and space. Other types of media, including the Internet, newspapers, magazines and large segments of cable television rely heavily on advertising for a major portion of their revenues. Indeed, without advertising dollars, many of today’s media outlets would not exist, and the cost of those that survived would be substantially higher for the consumer. Advertising revenue has helped lead to a tremendous proliferation of media choices. For example, television viewers in the early 1950’s and 60’s could

watch only three broadcast networks. Today, viewers can choose from multiple broadcast networks, hundreds of cable channels and direct broadcast satellite programming. The advertising-supported business model has also fueled the explosive growth of the Internet, creating a low barrier-to entry for an immense number of entrepreneurial online businesses. According to research firm comScore, more than 200 million Americans age 15 or older use search engines each month. These consumers are going to the Internet to access – at no cost – all types of content: from news and health, to sports and entertainment, to job listings and travel recommendations. The most popular Internet search engines, news outlets, entertainment portals, photo and video sharing services and social

networking sites all give consumers free access to vast content and online experiences thanks to their advertising revenues. The online media has developed at an extraordinary pace. It took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million Americans; network television took 13 years and cable television took 10 years. It took only about three years for the Internet to reach 50 million users in the U.S. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), there was $23.4 billion spent on advertising and paid search on the Internet in 2008. To put this in perspective, the Internet today is a bigger advertising medium than radio, outdoor advertising and about the same as consumer magazines. (www.iab.net). However, policymakers need to refrain from imposing undue restrictions that would limit

the effectiveness of interactive advertising, thereby diminishing the flow of ad dollars into this promising new media channel. The economic health of most of American media, including the online marketplace, rests primarily on the strong financial foundation provided by advertising. You see that modern economy, especially advertising, as a part of modern economy not only in the USA, is much connected with pop culture: TV, Internet, literature, art and etc. This phenomenon is very interesting. The problem of advertising is very important for economics because you need ads for promoting your production, especially if you only start your own business. Everybody knows that ad is connected with the culture: TV, magazines, newspapers, radio, even films an so on. So in my work I’ll