CHAPTER ONE

BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

1.1         INTRODUCTION

The history of advertising can be traced to Egypt, where availability of products where local, that is, street wheels used by peddlers to hawk their wares. Greek made use of his by shouting announcement of the sales of the cattle and slaves, in Rome signs were pasted up producing area and gladiator matches. Examples of advertising have also been founded in Pompeii and Carthage

Daramola, (2001:217).

Advertising has often been defined functionally and semantically and there are quite a number of such definitions around. Wright Warner and Winter for example defined advertising as “controlled identifiable information and persuasion by means of the mass media” while the (British) institute of Advertising: Practitioners sees it as presenting “the most persuasive selling message to the right prospects of the product or services at the lowest possible cost”.

The state popularly defined Advertising (91982:26) “as the product of services inform his potential consumers to why, low and when they should buy that product or services”. Adler and Lever defined advertising consisting of all forms of paid, non personal, all their activities by which oral or visual message are addressed to the public at large or to a selected numbers of people informing them about and influencing them to buy the product and services featured in the advertisements.

To Adeniran (1989:2) and Ogechukwu (1997) advertising is a group of activities among including dissemination of information in any paid, product or services to compel action in advertisement.

The most popular and widely acceptable definition however seems to be that given by the American Marketing Association (A.M.A) as follow “ Advertising is any paid form of non–personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods or services by an identified sponsor”.

The key words of this definition are paid from”, “non-personal” “presentation and promotion”, ideas, goods or services” and “identified sponsor. A quick consideration of these key words reveals how the American Marketing Associations