Advertising management is how a company carefully plans and controls its advertising to reach its ideal customers and convince them to buy.^{[citation needed]}

Marketers use different types of advertising. Brand advertising is defined as a non-personal communication message placed in a paid, mass medium designed to persuade target consumers of a product or service benefits in an effort to induce them to make a purchase.^{[citation needed]} Corporate advertising refers to paid messages designed to communicate the corporation's values to influence public opinion. Yet other types of advertising such as not-for-profit advertising and political advertising present special challenges that require different strategies and approaches.^{[citation needed]}

Advertising management is a complex process that involves making many layered decisions including developing advertising strategies, setting an advertising budget, setting advertising objectives, determining the target market, media strategy (which involves media planning), developing the message strategy, and evaluating the overall effectiveness of the advertising effort.) Advertising management may also involve media buying.

Advertising management is a complex process. However, at its simplest level, advertising management can be reduced to four key decision areas:

Consumers tend to think that all forms of commercial promotion constitute advertising. However, in marketing and advertising, the term "advertising" has a very special meaning that reflects its status as a distinct type of promotion.

The marketing and advertising literature has many different definitions of advertising, but it is possible to identify common elements or themes within most of these definitions. The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines advertising as "the placement of announcements and persuasive messages in time or space purchased in any of the mass media by business firms, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and individuals who seek to inform and/ or persuade members of a particular target market or audience about their products, services, organizations, or ideas". The American Heritage Dictionary defines advertising as "the activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media". Selected marketing scholars have defined advertising in the following terms: "any non-personal communication that is paid for by an identified sponsor, and involves either mass communication viz newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and other media (e.g., billboards, bus stop signage) or direct to-consumer communication via direct mail". and "the element of the marketing communications mix that is non-personal, paid for by an identified sponsor, and disseminated through mass channels of communication to promote the adoption of goods, services, persons, or ideas." One of the shortest definitions is that advertising is "a paid, mass-mediated attempt to persuade".

Several common themes emerge in the various definitions of advertising:

In summary, given that advertising is paid, it is one of the many controllable elements in the marketing program. Advertising is qualitatively different from publicity where the message sponsor is either not identified or ambiguously defined, and different from personal selling which occurs in real-time and involves some face-to-face contact between the message sponsor and recipient allowing for two-way dialogue.