Section C Passage 2 The strategic role of advertising in marketing programs varies by time, pl ace, and company. Advertising is but one element of the promotional blend of advertising, personal selling, and sales promotions, and promotion is but one element of the marketing program. The potential cost and accomplishment of advertising must be weighed against the cost and benefits to be gained by focusing on other elements of the promotional or marketing program. Advertising can be most effective in a nation with well-developed advertising facilities and a market that responds to such stimulation. Like any other strategic weapon, advertising should be used only when it can contribute economically and effectively to the attainment of corporate goals. Advertising is both potentially and actually a force enhancing economic development. Newspapers, magazines, television, and radio have all developed and flourished in large part because of the great sums of money supplied to these media through advertising expenditures.  The growing economic health of the media, and the freedom from central control which advertising funds make possible, greatly enhance communications throughout the world; and effective communication is a basic requirement of economic development . Most analyses of the economic aspects of advertising concentrate on the contributions of advertising in helping to develop mass markets, which in turn foster mass production and facilitate mass distribution. Advertising's function is not to rob sales from competitors, but to teach new need satisfying consumption patterns in developing countries. As one authority notes, “the role of the mass media in developing countries is often to spur primary demand instead of building brand preference as in industrialized countries.” Advertising has demonstrated its effectiveness as a teacher of new ways of living. It shows people how to use products and gives them confidence to try better foods, new ways of keeping clean, use of tools, and a whole host of improved ways of living. Advertising also explains the use of money to purchase alternatives, to save for the future and for future purchases. In effect, advertising helps to change expectations for the material future as well as aid economic and social change. Once mass markets have been developed, mass production inevitable follow, bringing the consequent economies of large scale operation. Then advertising enters the picture again to facilitate mass distribution by helping to establish brand names, product preference, and product information and by performing other consumer assistance functions.