Advertising: purpose & methods

Advertising is all around you — on the radio, on billboards, on your phone — and in this lesson we finally understand it. We define advertising as paid communication that firms use to inform and persuade us to buy. We meet its two big families, informative and persuasive, and learn to tell them apart. We list why firms advertise and the many methods they use, from NBC radio to social media. Then we watch advertising push a demand curve to the right, and weigh up honestly its good and bad sides for firms and for consumers.