·         When you see an advertisement you like, do you usually go and buy the product?

·         Do you find most of the advertisements you see informative or entertaining, or annoying?

·         Which is your favourite advertisement? Why do you like it?

·         Match the words with their meanings.

excessive promote perseverance campaign materialism

belief that getting money and things is the most important thing in life much more than is reasonable or necessary to help something develop and be successful determination to keep trying to do or achieve something a series of actions to achieve a particular result

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Teams of writers, artists, and designers work together at advertising companies to produce effective ads. Although advertising can increase the sales of a product, the cost is not cheap. Billions of dollars are spent each year on advertising campaigns to market products. Newspaper ads can cost thousands of dollars, magazine and Web ads can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and television commercials can run into millions.

Why do companies spend so much money to promote their products or services? When successful, advertising can create powerful images connected to a particular brand. Whether we like them or not, ads become part of our consciousness and may remain in our memories for decades.

With so many forms of communication competing for our attention today, it is not easy to get one message to stand out from the others. This is the challenge of advertising, to create slogans, or short memorable phrases, that will remind us of a particular brand.

Some ads aim to create a feeling of warmth and comfort. The Pillsbury food company has shown scenes of mothers taking cookies or cakes out of the oven to promote their baking products. “Nothing says loving like something from the oven” is the slogan that associates their products with the warmth of family and home.

Other ads use humour to catch the attention of the audience. A series of advertisements for milk called “Got Milk?” has featured famous celebrities with milk on their upper lips, looking as if they are wearing milk “moustaches”.

Inspiration and perseverance are themes appearing in numerous ads. The sportswear company Nike has created a successful ad campaign that shows athletes exercising and pushing themselves to the limit. Nike’s simple slogan “Just do it” encourages viewers to jump into some type of physical exercise themselves.

Critics of advertising point out that audiences are faced by a vast number of ads pushing them to buy, buy, buy. They say that the strong forces of advertising contribute to a society that is based on materialism. Other people simply find ads annoying when they take up huge amounts of space in newspapers or magazines, interrupt television programmes, or pop up on computer screens. Parents, especially, often feel frustrated by excessive advertising. They find themselves having to tell their children that they do not really need to eat every new kind of snack food or buy every new toy on the market. It is estimated that advertisers spend more than $12 billion per year on advertising messages aimed at the youth market. Today, the average child watches more than 40,000 television commercials per year.

Most of us, however, will admit to finding at least some ads entertaining or even informative. Whether we find ads annoying or not, it is certain that they will continue to appear in much of what we read and watch.