The age of the mass media was first predicted by Robert Louis Stevenson when he said; “soon men will not live on bread alone but by catch words.”

Today, this prediction is made manifest in view of the increasing global competition among marketers to sell their products. Through promotional offers and commercial inducement, humanity is yoked under financial and emotional burden as it waddles between the very option of genuine choice and need and what analyst call “an obligatory commitment to product patronages” in its most ubiquitous sense of offer .

The dynamics of the advertising industry requires that marketers keep constant touch with their client without been slackened or overtaken by other competitors. Humanity is therefore placed at the receiving end of decisions set by large corporations to which we are gravely alienated in suggestion making, but whose overbearing influence and dictates we yearn to satisfy our endless cravings for comfort, convenience, leisure among other necessities that are central to human existence.

Advertising agencies are aware of human’s handicap to get off the treadmill of unbridled  consumption of his endless needs. They know that humanity is confronted with the challenges of choice amidst several competitive elements, and as stated by Patrick Rivers, they know that, “humanity finds it difficult to rediscover what his genuine needs are, rather than accept what he is told he desires, or what he allows himself to become lured to demand”.

Advertising therefore becomes the basic parameters for companies and marketers to keep in business and maintain their relevance to the public whose conviction must be based on clearly conceived and intended messages.

To command the confidence of the public, advertisement messages must go beyond mere commercial gimmicks and be truthful and reliable. This is because if language is not in accordance with the truth of things, the messages of advertisement will be valueless.

The need for reliability in advertisement messages is buttressed by the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote down the basic principles of communication, “A false notion which is clear and precise will always have more power in the world than a true principle which is obscure and involved.”

In compliance with this basic communication principle, an advertisement message intended to be used profitably to achieve a good marketing objectives must be clearly positioned on the basis of conciseness, uniqueness and clarity in addition to a nexus of other creative variables.

Advertising has come to cover the whole range of human needs through the combination of real creative imagination and a deep study of human psychology. This is because it brings to the greatest number of people actual knowledge of useful things, it becomes an essential form of education.

The general raising of the standard of modern civilization among all groups of people during the past half century would have been impossible without the spreading of the knowledge of higher standards by means of advertising. Advertising thus nurses the consuming power of man. It creates wants for a better home, better clothing, better food and other desirous things of life, it spurs individual exertion and greater production.

According to Henry Beechen, “the advertisement in newspaper are more full of knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns.”

You can therefore tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisement. In a way, doing a business without advertisement is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing but nobody else does.

However, the major challenges facing marketers in today’s competitive environment is how to sustain their brand identities through effective advertising and positioning to capture the mind of consumers. This challenges objectives and results to the advertising agencies sometimes making bogus claims which are flouted  in the long run.

Doctor Samuel Johnson once wrote: “Promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement.

But today people are beginning to hold up companies to their promises and claims. They are fed up with having their intelligence insulted and their pockets robbed. They have thus decried other justifiable means of holding these agencies to their sense of responsibilities. The inability of some companies to live up to these challenges has led to the demise of their products while consumers of such brands have diverted to using other brands which may not be as useful as the oscillating brand. As consumer’s taste widens, brand identities also pose serious challenges to marketers who must strive consistently to relay the efficaciousness of their brand to their teeming consumers lest they lose them in the face of such glaring competitions.

Skillful advert practitioners are therefore in the face of this widening competition among brands and products, adopting massive strategies to bait the attention of the public by making flower arrangement of the facts, placing them so that the wilted and less attractive petals are hidden by sturdy blooms. This form of advertisement is designed to delude the public and hold their attention to win them over.

The target of these advertisement practitioners is basically to advance their merits over other competitors.

The secret of advertising is a simple message that everyone can understand and respond to provided it is not a facile move to deceive the audience all in the name of selling a product.

Perhaps, advertising in the final analysis should be news. If it is not news, it is worthless.

A good advertisement message is one that educates the people on the use of product in addition to luring consumers to the point of purchase. However, without any intention to demean the advertising industry in Nigeria, there are glaring indications that the industry is faced with grave challenges. Like every other field, there are professional challenges to grow at pace with modern trends. There are also challenges of strategic breakthrough. Rather than identifying their consumers, and packaging the appropriate messages for them, and the quality of brands to put across, attention is geared towards glamour and humour in advertisement messages, which inadvertently appeal to the public as entertainment programmes rather than capturing their mind.

Thus, most foreign products have taken over the market through qualitative advertisement, reducing patronages of local products. The regulatory body of the industry in Nigeria, the Advertisement Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) has a lot to do in this regard. It has to moderate the industry to respond to global imperatives, and trends. This include an unwinking   alert against the activities of infiltrators. Advertisement as a concept is required in our daily life, and it is prone to constant review and update in line with the dynamics of human needs and consumption.

Taneh Beemene