The concept of advertising existed long before we had a term for it. In 981A.D., the great Viking explorer Eric the Red left Norway to survey an island west of Iceland. Except for the southern coast this new land was little more than a gigantic iceberg. But Eric was a natural at advertising. To persuade immigrants to leave Norway and settle the island, he painted a picture of temperate climate, rolling meadows and lush farmland. To top it all off, he named it Greenland. Eric created a brand. Hundreds of land-starved Vikings boarded longships and headed west for this so-called "greenland."

Advertising is defined as the art of positioning and creating brands and persuading consumers to buy them through messages in mass media. The clothes you wear, the cars you drive, the food you eat and the soft drinks you consume are all brands. Advertising is a creative and inclusive field unique in the business world. "Advertising agencies are idea stores, and just about everyone gets in on the act," says Chuck Bachrach, media director of the Los Angeles-based full-service advertising agency Rubin Postaer and Associates. "If you have a fire in your belly and want to work with smart, creative, fun people in a business that's virtually blind to race and gender, there's no business quite as satisfying."

Branding

David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather, knew something about brands, having created icons like The American Express Card and Rolls Royce. He defined a brand as: "The intangible sum of a product's attributes: its name, packaging and price, its history, its reputation and the way it's advertised." The best way to understand a brand is to think of it as a friend. We choose brands in exactly the same way we choose friends. Brands are friends; products are strangers. Branding is an emotional process of involvement. At its most basic level advertising, like friendship, is a three-stage process -- awareness, trial and repeat. In the first stage, awareness, you hear about a brand. In the second stage, trial, you're persuaded to buy it and try it. If you like it, you buy it again and again. You're a repeat customer. Along the way, you find that you and the brand share the same values. You wouldn't think about using anything else.

A brand is an image, a conception in consumers' minds. Implicit within the image is a unique promise of value and trust that distinguishes it from its competitors. The job of an advertising agency is to use every tool at its disposal to clothe the brand with substance and endow it with personality -- to make it a trusted friend.

What is PR?

It's hard to give an all-encompassing definition of public relations because it is practiced in so many different ways for different people and organizations. PR includes publicity, press agentry, book publicity, propaganda (for the government), corporate communications, crisis management and advertising.