An advertising agency, either online or offline, is meant to make the products it serves notorious among its potential consumers. Advertising is defined as the science of positioning and creating brands and persuading consumers to buy them through messages in mass media. The shoes you wear, the cars you drive, the food you eat and the drinks you consume are all brands. Many even regard advertising as an art, because of its psychological implications.

Advertising is a creative and inclusive field unique in the business world. Advertising agencies are like stores of ideas, and if you want to work with smart, creative, fun people in a business that doesn't take into consideration race and gender issues, there's no business quite as satisfying.

At its most basic level advertising, like friendship, is a three-stage process consisting of awareness, trial and repeat. In the first stage, awareness, you hear about a brand. In the second stage, trial, you're persuaded to buy it and try it. If you like it, you buy it again and again. You're a repeat customer. Along the way, you find that you and the brand share the same values. You wouldn't think about using anything else.

A brand is an image, a conception in consumers' minds. Implicit within the image is a unique promise of value and trust that distinguishes it from its competitors. The job of an advertising agency is to use every tool at its disposal to clothe the brand with substance and endow it with personality and make it a trusted friend.

Consumers also buy things and services that reflect a brand reputation and fit with their own personal values and aspirations. They may develop an emotional relationship with a brand, buying it for the simple reason that they have always bought it, or because it reminds them of their childhood, or because it gives them a taste of the glamour they want in their life.

Good advertisers can tap into this well of emotion. It's a maxim of advertising when products are similar, the advertising has to rely on the difference in the experience. Advertising attaches value to the product by creating the anticipation of a superior experience. (Just take a look, for instance, at some of the shampoo television ads, which strongly imply that women will be brought to the heights of ecstasy merely by shampooing their hair with the product.)

If the links between customer and brand are properly built, leveraged and translated into an emotionally involving and gratifying experience, an intensely loyal, committed customer will result. Virtually every business follows some variation of the 20/80 rule. Roughly, 20 percent of customers generate 80 percent of sales. Their lifetime value to the brand is significant. The best customers often become brand advocates and recruit new customers.