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Advertising Defined: "The Process of Making Known"

The Framework

Advertising Defined from Alex Hormozi's $100M Leads strips the word "advertising" of its cultural baggage — the connotations of manipulation, interruption, and sleazy sales tactics — and replaces it with a first-principles definition: advertising is simply "the process of making known." Making strangers aware that you exist, that you solve a specific problem, and that you have something worth their attention.

This redefinition is strategically important because it reframes the entrepreneur's relationship with advertising from reluctant obligation to core business function. Many business owners — especially service providers, professionals, and creators — resist advertising because they associate it with the worst practices of the industry. Hormozi's definition removes the moral charge: making known isn't manipulation. It's communication. And without it, the best product in the world dies in obscurity.

Why the Definition Matters

The traditional frame — advertising as persuasion, manipulation, or interruption — produces three destructive patterns in entrepreneurs.

Avoidance. Professionals who believe their work should "speak for itself" refuse to advertise, then wonder why their inferior competitors outperform them. The work can't speak for itself if nobody knows it exists. Making known is the prerequisite for the work speaking at all.

Guilt. Entrepreneurs who do advertise feel morally compromised, which produces half-hearted, apologetic marketing that signals low confidence. The customer reads the uncertainty and trusts the competitor who advertises boldly. Guilt about advertising becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of advertising failure.

Misdirection. Entrepreneurs who equate advertising with paid media (billboards, Facebook ads, TV spots) ignore the three other advertising methods: warm outreach, content, and cold outreach. These methods don't feel like "advertising" because they don't involve media buys — but under Hormozi's definition, they absolutely are advertising. A personal conversation that makes a stranger aware of your solution is advertising. A social media post that explains your methodology is advertising. A cold email that introduces your offer is advertising.

The expanded definition means that every entrepreneur is already advertising — they're just doing it unconsciously, inconsistently, and inefficiently. The shift from unconscious to conscious advertising is the shift from hoping people find you to systematically making yourself known.

The Core Four Advertising Methods

Hormozi's definition of advertising generates his operational framework — the Core Four — organized as a 2×2 matrix:

Warm audiences (people who know you): Warm Outreach (one-to-one) and Content (one-to-many).

Cold audiences (strangers): Cold Outreach (one-to-one) and Paid Ads (one-to-many).

All four are forms of "making known." They differ in audience temperature (warm vs. cold) and communication scale (one-to-one vs. one-to-many). The definition unifies them under a single strategic umbrella: each is a method for moving strangers from "don't know you exist" to "aware of what you offer."

Hormozi's recommendation: start with warm outreach (cheapest, highest conversion, lowest risk), then add content (free but time-intensive), then cold outreach (scalable but lower conversion), then paid ads (fast but expensive). The progression builds skills and cash flow at each stage that fund the next.

Cross-Library Connections

Dib's Lean Marketing uses a different definition — marketing as "creating value" — but arrives at a compatible conclusion: the purpose of marketing isn't to trick people into buying but to genuinely serve them while making them aware of your solution. Hormozi's "making known" and Dib's "creating value" are two aspects of the same ethical advertising philosophy.

Voss's Never Split the Difference applies the same reframe to negotiation: negotiation isn't manipulation — it's the process of reaching agreements that serve both parties. Both Hormozi and Voss strip loaded words of their negative connotations to make practitioners more comfortable deploying essential professional skills.

Cialdini's Influence provides the psychological mechanisms that make advertising effective once you've committed to doing it. Cialdini's principles (reciprocity, social proof, scarcity, authority, liking, unity) are the tools that determine whether "making known" actually moves people from awareness to action.

Berger's Contagious explains how advertising can become self-propagating: when your message is remarkable (social currency), triggered by everyday cues, emotionally arousing, publicly visible, practically valuable, and wrapped in stories, the people you make known become advertisers themselves — each one making you known to their network without additional effort from you.

Implementation

  • Replace "advertising" with "making known" in your vocabulary. Notice how the emotional resistance drops when you think of it this way.
  • Audit your current "making known" activities. What are you currently doing — consciously or unconsciously — that makes strangers aware you exist? List every channel.
  • Identify the gaps. Which of the Core Four methods are you currently not using? That gap is your highest-leverage opportunity.
  • Commit to one new advertising method this quarter. If you're only doing warm outreach, add content. If you're only doing content, add cold outreach.
  • Set a daily advertising target. The Rule of 100 applies: 100 primary advertising actions per day. Whether that's 100 warm outreach messages, 100 pieces of content, or 100 ad variations — volume is what makes advertising work.

    • 📚 From $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi — Get the book