Advertising is one of the promotional elements which has been utilized very effectively by the marketers to target the customers. But, of late, advertising has taken a lot of flak. It has been accused of promoting materialism, manipulation and to promote products, targeting children, and on the whole sending the social value system of our culture down the chute. Some of the critiques brand advertising as an unethical practice. The need of the hour is to reframe the tarnished image of advertising.

Advertising has come a long way since it was used for the first time merely for announcements. But, modern advertising was born in the 19^th century with the first advertising agent being Volney B Palmer.

Phillip Kotler (1996) defines advertising as "Any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, and services by an identified sponsor."The paid part of the definition shows that both space and time for the dissemination of the advertising message has a price. Whereas, the non-personal part involves the mass media like radio, TV, newspapers, etc.

Advertisements do more than inform or persuade. They eloquently translate feelings and opinions. Through advertising and the media we receive an enormous amount of silent information: How to act in relation to people, property, and ourselves. And that information is a barometer, attuned to social change. There are many models for the way in which advertising works. For example, the Consumer Response Theory of Kotler, the Exposure and Familiarity Model of RB Zajonc, the AIDA Model developed in the early 1990s, the Hierarchy-of-Effects Model proposed by Lavidge and Steiner, the Innovation Adoption Model of EM Rogers and last, but not the least, the Information Processing Model of William McGuire. But because of a need for strategic thinking and creativity during the planning of any advertisements, Foote, Cone, and Belding (FCB) headed by Richard Vaughn came up with a comprehensive model for advertising. The FCB model can be understood with the help of matrix. The first quadrant represents the informative strategy. This has high involvement for products and/or services and the prevalence of thinking and economic considerations. The products which fall in this category are cars, home appliances, etc. The traditional hierarchy-of-response model has been modified as "learn®feel®do".

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