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The impact of advertising has been a matter of considerable debate and many different claims have been made in different contexts. During debates about the banning of cigarette advertising a common claim from cigarette manufacturers was that cigarette advertising does not encourage people to smoke who would not otherwise. The (eventually successful) opponents of advertising, on the other hand, claim that advertising does in fact increase consumption.
According to many sources, the past experience and state of mind of the person subjected to advertising may determine the impact that advertising has. Children under the age of four may be unable to distinguish advertising from other television programmes, while the ability to determine the truthfulness of the message may not be developed until the age of eight.
Over the past 15 years a whole science of marketing analytics and marketing effectiveness has been developed to determine the impact of marketing actions on consumers, sales, profit andmarket share Marketing mix modeling direct response measurement and other techniques are included in this science.
As advertising and marketing efforts become increasingly ubiquitous in modern Western socieities the industry has come under criticism from groups such as Adbusters via culture jamming which criticizes the media and consumerism using advertising's own techniques.