Globalization, commodity parity, consumer sovereignty, super competition and a broad variety of other factors, including the roll-out of the mass media, the emergence and rapid rise of the new media formats and platforms as well as the exchange of information provided by social networks pose new challenges for the advertising industry. Throughout its 150 years of history, since we have known it as a distinct occupation and practice, advertising shows adaptive sustainability quality and greatly enhance its capacity as features, forms, user approaches and distribution channels. Nevertheless, by its very nature, advertising retains the constant of an asymmetric pattern of communication in which, in nowadays environment, the success of effort is expressed in the formula of understanding others and the willingness they to understand us in return. In practice, beyond the abstract of this formula, the effort of advertisers in the process of creating and planning a certain campaign would be greatly facilitated by putting the basic principles of empathy theory. Numerous experiments and studies of this human ability establish working models to achieve effective contact both at the level of personal communication and in the cases of direct and indirect communication with huge quantity and variety of audiences with specific composition. Synthesized and brought to a universal level of application, the basic principle of empathy is the ability, rather cognitive than emotional, to understand and to feel the feelings of others. The achievements in this psychology field currently apply mainly to psychotherapy, clinical psychiatry, pedagogy and political rhetoric theories and ractices. Experience proves that empathic skills help the communicator for faster, easier, more effective and more properly understood and accordingly more efficient as a moderator. This article provokes a new paradigm for advertisers in communicating with the public - about the content, forms and planning of communication activities of the principles of empathy. The goal of the effort is clear - creating more effective communication and achieving a sustainablecompetitive advantage.
‘We have a prodigious amount in common’. Reappraising Americanisation and circulation of knowledge in the interwar Nordic advertising industry
