In past decades, marketers perfected the art of mass marketing: selling highly standardized
products to masses of customers. In the process, they developed effective mass-media communications
techniques to support these strategies. Large companies now routinely invest
millions or even billions of dollars in television, magazine, or other mass-media advertising,
reaching tens of millions of customers with a single ad. Today, however, marketing
managers face some new marketing communications realities. Perhaps no other area of
marketing is changing so profoundly as marketing communications, creating both exciting
and anxious times for marketing communicators.