"Advertising" or "advertisement" comes from Latin “advertere”, which means an approach to arouse public attention to something and induce a certain direction. Traditional definitions of advertising include a series of elements that distinguish the field from others. Each innovation in communication has been used for advertising, and in some way, each has changed advertising, which in turn has changed the set of elements used in its definition. However, there are or should be some essential elements that determine whether an activity is advertising, that is to say, the essential meaning is largely identical but with minor differences. In short, advertising is the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media. And we can learn the functions of advertising from the definition above which are listed as follows:1)information function; 2)demand creation function; 3)persuasive function; 4)get attention function; 5)goodwill establishment function.

“廣告”一詞來源于拉丁文“advertere”，指的是引起公眾對某一件東西的關(guān)注以及引導(dǎo)其往某一特定方向的方法。廣告的傳統(tǒng)定義包括一系列卻別與其他行業(yè)的元素。交流中的每一種創(chuàng)新都被用到廣告中，每一種創(chuàng)新都以某種方式改變了廣告，這反過來已經(jīng)改變了它的定義中使用的背景元素。然而，有或者應(yīng)該有一些決定一項活動是否是廣告的基本元素，也就是說，基本意思大體是一樣的，但是又細微的區(qū)別。簡而言之，廣告通常是支付的非個人信息的溝通，通常是由贊助商通過各類媒體識別的，在產(chǎn)品自然屬性、服務(wù)或者想法方面頗具說服力。我們可以從以上定義了解廣告的功能，如：1）信息功能；2)需求創(chuàng)造功能；3）說服功能；4）引起關(guān)注的功能；5）商譽設(shè)置功能。