Purposes of Advertising: 4 Key Advertising Functions

The purposes of advertising cover a wide range, from promoting a product launch to keeping existing customers engaged with your brand after they buy. Advertising is critical in today’s crowded media marketplace, where everyone is competing for a valuable currency: customer attention.

According to a 2025 forecast from advertising and PR firm Dentsu: “As algorithms increasingly shape what people see, like, and buy, brands must find new ways to cut through or risk fading from consumer consideration.” As brands are looking for ways to break through in this “algorithm era,” the report says, “media serves as the connective system between brands and consumers and every touchpoint becomes a moment to connect, shop, share, experiment and belong.”

Here’s what advertising is, eight types of advertising to reach distinct audiences, and the key purposes of advertising, with insights from ecommerce founders.

What is advertising?

Advertising is a marketing tactic in which you pay for space to promote your product, service, or cause. Its goal is to use promotional messages—called advertisements or ads—to reach your target audience. 

Marketing and advertising work in tandem. Advertising is part of your larger marketing strategy, which encompasses a broad range of tactics designed to help you identify, reach, and convince prospective buyers. Ideally, advertising generates awareness of your business ethos, products, and services, and, ultimately, convinces and converts prospective buyers.

Typically, a seller defines a target audience and creates a message or offer for the ad, encouraging an action, such as a call to action to visit a website, make a purchase, or sign up for an email list. 

They then pay for space or time in an advertising channel and measure the results of the ad through impressions, clicks, conversions, advertising revenue, or return on ad spend (ROAS).

8 types of advertising

Different types of advertising have different purposes. For example, print and digital ads reach different audiences: A billboard on a busy highway catches a wide local audience as they commute, while a paid search ad reaches someone already typing your product category into Google—two very different customer intents calling for different ad formats.

Here are eight types of advertising you can use to engage consumers across a range of formats and channels:

• Paid search ads. Targeted search engine ads are a type of online advertising that appear alongside search results.

• Banner ads. Banner ads are graphic digital displays that direct traffic to your online store. These online ads are rectangular and typically run either at the sides, top, or bottom of a web page or article.

• Social media ads.Paid social ads promote services or products on social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. With Shop Campaigns, businesses can set up targeted advertising across popular platforms that can help reach and convert customers, with ample data tools to track how specific campaigns are resonating with viewers.

• Display video.Display ads, a visually driven form of digital advertising, are videos placed on digital platforms including websites and apps. 

• Influencer ads.Influencer marketing includes paid ads, such as when you partner with a content creator to advertise a certain product or service to their audience. 

• Email ads. Email ads are brand announcements, product promotions and discounts, newsletters, and other information sent directly to a customer’s inbox as part of an email marketing strategy. 

• Podcast ads.Podcast ads are audio-based advertisements aimed at listeners of specific programs. These ad spots, sometimes read by the show’s hosts, can promote services and products to their fanbase.

• Traditional advertising. Radio or television ads are both considered forms of traditional advertising media. Television advertising spots typically combine text and visual elements to tell a memorable story to broadcast TV network viewers. Radio ads are audio-based and serve the major radio networks.

Purposes of advertising

• Building brand awareness
• Informing customers
• Generating demand
• Driving sales and building brand loyality

Understanding the key purposes of advertising can help you build stronger ties with consumers and better visibility in the marketplace. Here are four purposes of advertising that apply no matter the format:

Building brand awareness

Advertising campaigns focused on brand awareness target potential customers at the top of the marketing funnel. These campaigns help your audience become familiar with your business, its products, and its branding.

For example, on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, Kristen Pumphrey, cofounder of P.F. Candle Co., says this type of advertising provides a way to clearly communicate your brand identity to customers—making sure they understand your brand ethos. “You’ve got to be at the top of the funnel in the visibility area and getting people aware of your brand,” she says.

Informing customers

Informative advertising creates awareness by presenting factual information and letting customers draw their own conclusions about a product’s value. 

Informative advertisements often include feature lists, statistics, case studies, price comparisons, and performance data. Visually appealing visual aids, like infographics, are a great example of informative advertisements. Infographics can quickly communicate data, such as statistics and side-by-side comparisons with a competitor’s product, in a striking and digestible way. 

Research lends credence to the idea that informative advertising can stick with customers as they browse through websites, social media, and apps as well as in traditional advertising channels, like print, radio, and television. A February 2026 study in Computers in Human Behavior found that the informativeness of a social media ad made a notable difference in enhancing consumer trust.

Generating demand

A strong advertising presence can also help businesses generate demand for their products and services.

For example, Influencer marketing can help drum up sales. Sean Frank, CEO of Ridge, says that partnering with influencer Marques Brownlee—who racks up about 10 million views on YouTube per video post—has been essential to advertising his brand’s phone cases, wallets, and other products. 

“He has built-in distribution, he’s great at storytelling, and it’s just like a stamp of approval,” Sean says on Shopify Masters. “If we’re working with him, people are more willing to try our phone case.”

Alternatively, Liquid Death has found that investing in paid social media posts as part of their advertising strategy helped them grow quickly, especially in their early days. The caveat, says the company’s VP, Andy Pearson, is that those paid social posts have to feel “living and organic” in order to grab consumers’ attention and thus generate demand.

Driving sales and building brand loyalty

Done right, an effective advertising campaign can drive sales. On Shopify Masters, the founders of One Kid said that a single video ad they posted on Facebook—which went viral with more than 5 million views—directly led to them doing $200,000 in sales. 

Shopify has tools that can help you shore up your paid and organic advertising offerings. Shop Campaigns can improve your ads’ effectiveness by tailoring them to either new or returning customers. Shopify Audiences can help you reach high-intent shoppers: The brand Happy Hippo, for instance, ran an ad campaign and found that 23% of the shop’s sales came from new-to-brand customers who were directly attributable to Shopify Audiences, according to a Shopify case study.