Advertising is only one of the traditional components of marketing communications.
The others are promotions, public relations and personal selling. Each has its own set of merits and limitations. Traditionally, advertising is cheap, but it represents little direct measurable connection between marketing dollars and increased sales. And on the other end of the scale, personal selling is atrociously expensive but shows measurable impact on the bottom line. In many ways, plain vanilla advertising is not and cannot be effective in the Internet universe due to limitations the current technology places on the effective distribution of rich content information.