Advertising is a marketing tool and may be used in combination with other marketing tools, such as sales promotions, personal selling tactics, or publicity. Advertising is often thought of as the paid, non-personal promotion of a cause, idea, product, or service by an identified sponsor attempting to inform or persuade a particular target audience. There are many form's of advertising such as, newspapers, magazines, television and radio, business publications, billboards, and circulars sent through the mail. Advertising plays a vital role in any business organization and has a number of benefits for the advertiser.

Effective newspaper ads help small businesses generate sales. Most companies do not have the staff with the necessary skills or experience to create effective advertisements; furthermore, many advertising campaigns are temporary, so employers would have difficulty maintaining their own advertising staff. Depending on the results, a company will modify future advertising efforts in order to maximize effectiveness. Today's businesses rely heavily on business charts and trends to run their company effectively.

While advertising may seem like the perfect way to get a message out, it does have several limitations, the most commonly noted ones being its inability to focus on an individual consumer's specific needs, provide in-depth information about a product, and be cost-effective for small companies. What makes Internet advertising effective is the use of technologies that allow advertising networks, analytics firms, websites, and others to make inferences about consumer tastes and provide relevant content.

The major media types for advertising are:Newspapers, Television, Direct mail, Radio, Magazines, Internet, Outdoor (billboards, blimps, etc. In addition to newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media, advertising media include direct mail marketing, billboards and posters, transit advertising, the Internet, and promotional items such as matchbooks or calendars. If your sales effort feels like you're pushing boulders up steep hills, it's time to take a close look at your media advertising, especially the advertising you do in newspapers and magazines.

Examples of online advertising include contextual ads that appear on search engine results pages, banner ads, in text ads, Rich Media Ads, Social network advertising, online classified advertising, advertising networks and e-mail marketing, including e-mail spam. In-store advertising is any advertisement placed in a retail store. Celebrities are often involved in advertising campaigns such as television or print adverts to advertise specific or general products.

Unpaid advertising also called publicity advertising, can provide good exposure at minimal cost. Another significant trend regarding future of advertising is the growing importance of the niche market using niche or targeted ads. The efficiency of advertising is improved through advertising research. In everyday life, people come into contact with many different kinds of advertising. If you want the best chance of success, you are going to need to start with advertising, and you are going to need to always continue to be advertising, no matter how successful you think you are.