The history of advertising lies thousands of years in the past. According to O’Barr in his article “A Brief History of Advertising in America”, advertising has evolved from
“face-to-face selling messages to the stilted, repetitive, printed advertisements of early newspaper to the dynamism of mass communication by radio and television to the re-personalization of messages via cable, Internet, and direct mail” (2008).
As we can see, advertising techniques develop in accordance to the development of technology. When Europeans started to involve with the industrial revolution, advertising at the same time began to enter the marketing world. At that time, printed advertising was a very powerful tool to approach people regardless for the purpose of making businesses, selling products, spreading religious ideas, or informing people about new things. Nowadays however, printed advertising is no longer a main medium in marketing but the Internet has an important role in introducing new products and at the same time is in charge of all mediums of communication. The easy and costless features of the Internet make entrepreneurs and companies favor it more than any other medium. The importance of the Internet in marketing then improves the need of efficient advertisements in order to win customers. Prior to being exposed to multiple types of advertisements in my second writing class, I have no idea how local advertisements can give the outsiders and foreigners hints of what the culture of a particular country looks like. Nonetheless as an international student from Malaysia, I strongly rely on Malaysian local advertisements to describe Malaysia itself when people ask me how my country looks like. To my relief, local advertisements really help me in explaining social norms of Malaysians. At other points,