The term advertising is derived from the original Latin word advertere which means to turn the attention.

Every piece of advertising turns the attention of the readers or the listeners or the viewers or the onlookers towards a product or a service or an idea. Therefore, it can be said that any thing that turns the attention to an article or a service or an idea might be well called as advertising. According to American Marketing Association, Advertising is any paid form of non-personal presentation of ideas, goods or services by an identified sponsor. Advertising includes any informative or persuasive message carried by a non-personal medium and paid for by a sponsor whose product is in some way identified in the message. Traditional mass media, such as television and magazines, are most commonly used. However, the direct mailing of catalogues, electronic media advertisements featuring computerized ordering, and other direct-response vehicles are becoming increasingly popular. Global promotion involves a variety of activities, ranging from in- store point-of-purchase displays and Sunday newspaper coupons to satellite TV advertising and sponsorship of symphony orchestras, athletic events such as the Olympics, Soccers World Cup, and major tennis tournaments. All of these various tools need to be integrated and project a consistent message and image for maximum effectiveness. This is a stiff challenge for global marketers since the tools are not equally effective everywhere and some are not even available in certain country markets. The most visible promotional activity is perhaps global advertising. Global sales promotion, public relations, and publicity have also become powerful promotional tools because of developments in global communications and the opening-up of new markets. Then there is participation in international trade fairs, direct marketing, and personal selling, the last typically much more localized but still important. Global advertising can be defined as advertising more or less uniform across many countries, often not necessarily, in media vehicles with global reach. In many cases, complete uniformity is unobtainable because of linguistic and regulatory differences between nations or differences in media availability, but as with products, localized advertising can still be basically global. In contrast, multi-domestic advertising is international advertising deliberately adapted to particular markets and audiences in message and/or creative execution. There are several traditional problems facing the decision-maker in global advertising. These are as follows: 1) How to allocate a given advertising budget among several market countries? 2) What the message to be use in these various markets? 3) What media to select? But even before tackling these management decisions, the advertiser needs to define the objectives of the advertising in the different countries. And before doing that it is imperative that the decision-maker identify what can conceivably be expected from the global advertising effort. Thus, the logical starting point in global advertising management is the assessment of the role of advertising in the country markets and the availability of alternative advertising media.