The body of web advertising research has grown continuously during the last few years. Our understanding of the new medium has trailed the increasing web experience among advertisers and consumers. However, there is still one important knowledge gap, namely the communication effects of website advertising. How should websites be designed to attain brand-related communication effects?The authors wish to thank Nikita Shulakov, CEO of Sitepattern Research, for providing technical support and the SitePattern.com survey software.

Despite various surveys of consumer attitudes toward direct-to-consumer (DTC) prescription drug advertising, little is known about the effectiveness of specific advertising campaigns. This article combines brand-level advertising awareness, media spending, and print advertising message strategy data to examine message effects on DTC prescription drug advertising awareness. The findings show that after controlling for media spending, several message strategies are associated with higher levels of advertising awareness. Prescriptions for DTC drug advertising campaign design and implications for future research are presented.

Billions of dollars are spent in advertising for social change yet much of it is reported to be ineffective because of a lack of insight into the target audience. We illustrate the value of target insight in guiding advertising for social change with a focus on road rage, the always rude and often dangerous expression of anger on the highway. We add to the limited research in the field a new body of data about people who are prone to road rage. Target insight suggests a strategy for advertising to reduce road rage including who to talk to, what to say, and where, when, and how to say it.

What makes a brand loyalty program successful or cost-effective? Interviews of 41 managers of brand loyalty programs were conducted to establish the best practices for such programs. Following this, a study of 132 brand managers and a study of 643 consumers jointly show that brand managers may overestimate the importance of targeting heavy users (or frequent users) and may underestimate the effectiveness of inexpensive reward programs. In reality, low and moderate reward programs that target light users may generate higher incremental sales and may tend to be more profitable than is generally expected.

Over the last several decades, advertising effects on sales have been studied without appropriately taking into consideration competitors' advertising activities. As a result, advertisers often instinctively match competitors' spending proportionately when it is monitored. The weakness of such a competitive parity approach is that they implicitly assume zero-sum competition only. This study identifies a variety of competitive conditions under which better budgeting strategies can be formulated. Specifically, four types of competition are conceptualized based on how an advertiser and its competitors affect each other's sales according to level of media advertising spending. In addition, appropriate strategies for setting advertising budgets to deal with each situation are discussed. A mathematical method is developed to measure advertising effectiveness for both the advertiser and competitors on sales of a focal brand. The method computes current and carryover effects, identifies in which type of competition the advertiser is operating, and, accordingly, determines which budgeting strategy best suits the situation. In an empirical illustration, the method was applied to data collected monthly over eight years. The analyzed product was Scotch whisky sold in Thailand.

Children's opinion of advertising and their general skepticism toward it is of the utmost importance to both practitioners and those responsible for advertising control. In this article, the authors detail the development and validation of a scale measuring 8- to 12-year-olds' global attitude toward TV advertising. This scale has been built and validated in a French-speaking context following all the steps required by the classical Churchill (1979) paradigm.The authors are indebted to Richard Lutz at the University of Florida for insightful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) prescription drug advertising has grown significantly over the last few years and extended into a variety of health conditions, even as the controversy around it continues. How do consumers feel about this advertising, who reads it, and what are the likely behavioral responses? This article attempts to answer these questions. Based on a sample of 1,475 women who are regular readers of magazines, consumer attitudes and response to print DTC advertising is explored. Results show that women generally value DTC advertising, and readership levels are substantial especially if the advertisement is about a symptom that the respondent has or may have. DTC advertisements also seem to encourage respondents to ask their doctors about what they saw advertised, and some respondents are likely to insist on prescriptions as well. Age and usership of prescription drugs significantly enhance the interest and response to this category of advertising.

This study examines Chinese consumers' perceptions and responses to web banner advertising. Results suggest that just one additional banner exposure improves Chinese users' brand recall, changes their attitude toward the brand, and increases their purchase consideration. Although clickthrough was found to be a significant predictor for banner recall, there was no evidence that clickthrough affects brand recall, attitude toward the brand, or purchase consideration. Most of the findings in this study are congruent with those reported in the 1997 IAB Study.

Based on prior research, we identified seven factors that customers might consider important in a business-to-business website. Using a rigorous scale development procedure and a field study with 606 business customers, we developed valid and reliable scales for measuring these factors. Results revealed that organization is the most important factor in a website. This is followed by nontransaction-related interactivity, privacy/security, and informativeness. The other factors (transaction-related interactivity, personalization, and entertainment) were found to be relatively less important. Managerially useful differences were found in the importance ratings of these factors for those who use the web for purchase versus those who use the web for nonpurchase activities.This research was conducted with support from a large power tool company in the midwest region who wishes to remain anonymous. An earlier version of this paper won the Best Paper Award for the Emerging Business and Technology Track at the American Marketing Association's Winter Marketing Educator's Conference 2002. The authors acknowledge helpful comments and suggestions from Mark Gavin, Ajay Sukhdial, an anonymous reviewer from the Journal of Advertising Research, and two anonymous reviewers from the AMA Winter Marketing Educator's Conference.

This article describes the development and validation of a scale measuring the interactivity of websites. Three studies were conducted to verify the factor structure, content validity, discriminant validity, and reliability of the scale. Results from the studies showed that interactivity comprises three correlated but distinct dimensions: active control, two-way communication, and synchronicity. The multidimensional scale showed a high level of validity and reliability and yielded consistent ratings among both experienced and inexperienced internet users.

This study examined effects of structural and perceptual variables on attitude toward websites. Data were collected from 311 consumers who reviewed four hotel websites. The sites were structurally different in terms of having high versus low number of features and also in terms of informational versus transformational creative strategies. Involvement and perceived interactivity were the two perceptual variables examined in the study. Involvement with the subject of a site and the subdimension of perceived interactivity that measured level of engagement were the best predictors of attitude. Positive attitudes were also associated with sites that took advantage of web-specific features such as virtual tours and online reservations systems. A key implication of this study is the need for advertisers and researchers to reconsider advertising in the context of the web. Radio and television required advertisers to adjust to the new concepts of buying and selling time instead of space and of incorporating aural and visual appeals in messages. The web demands that advertisers adjust to a new medium that is not bound by either space or time and that has the technical capability to involve and engage the consumer.This study was funded in part by grants from the University of Tennessee Scholarly Activities Research Initiative Fund (SARIF) and the Department of Advertising and College of Communication at the University of Tennessee.

The authors consider the role of gender as it relates to e-commerce and offer a conceptual framework that attempts to explain why women are less satisfied than men with the online shopping experience. Perceived emotional benefits are discussed as a primary reason women lack support for e-commerce activity. Additional concepts in our model include trust (i.e., skepticism) and practicality (i.e., convenience). Our survey findings revealed that these three concepts—emotion, trust, and convenience—predicted women's dissatisfaction (and men's satisfaction) with online shopping, as well as men and women's actual shopping behavior. The authors offer ideas to help e-marketers form stronger emotional bonds with female shoppers.

The debate about which media metric efficiently measures the effectiveness of a web-based advertisement, such as banners, is still alive and well. Nonetheless, the most widely used measure of effectiveness for banner advertisements is still the click-through rate. The purpose of this article is to review the measures currently used to measure effectiveness in web advertising and to empirically determine the factors that might contribute to observed variations in click-through rates based on an actual sample of advertising campaigns. The study examined the complete set of all advertising insertions of 77 customers of a large advertising agency over a one-year period. A resulting sample of 1,258 placements was used to study the effect of banner formats and exposure levels on click-through rates using analysis of variance. Results suggest that the strongest effect on click-through rates comes from the use of trick banners (η2 = 0.25) and that other factors such as size of the advertisement, motion, use of “click here,” and “online only” type of announcers all have a significant impact of click-through rates. Implications of these findings as well as limitations of the current study are discussed and directions for future research agendas proposed.

This article demonstrates how presentation order, gender, and value relevance can influence advertising processing under different viewing situations. One study found that message order and gender influenced message persuasion: under situational low involvement, females (males) exhibited primacy (recency) effects when viewing two advertisements differing in values (help-self versus help-others) for a charity. In a second study, with higher situational involvement, all respondents appeared to process advertising messages systematically and considered the value content within the message in their evaluations. Thought-listing data revealed that females continued to exhibit primacy effects regardless of message appeal, but the recency effects with males disappeared when the advertisement (help-self) matched their values. Relevance for advertising effectiveness and media planning is discussed.

This article analyzes current advertisements for eye cream using deconstruction methodology. No outstanding elements emerged from the current communications when considered on a total panel basis. Some elements for advertisements showed some acceptance. Strong performing elements can be uncovered through segmentation. The segments transcend conventional ways of dividing the population and provide a new way for the advertiser to appeal to consumers.

This study investigates the impact of content and design elements on the click-through rates of banner advertisements using data from 8,725 real banner advertisements. It is one of the first empirical studies to examine banner advertising effectiveness (measured by click-through rates) and also one of the first to examine the differences between business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) banner advertisements.The authors acknowledge the financial and data support of Michael Moore and Marianna Dizik in the conduct of this study.

Content elements examined include the use of incentives and emotional appeals. Design elements examined include the use of interactivity, color, and animation. Results suggest that content and design elements do not work the same way for B2B and B2C banner advertisements.

3D Issue-Students and Observations.

We describe a meta-analysis of advertising conversion research findings that includes examining the influence of question framing on key output measures of advertising effectiveness. The article summarizes findings for 32 tourism-advertising studies. Two hypotheses are tested: (H1) the response rate to questionnaires mailed to sampled advertisement inquirers is lower when the brand sponsoring the study is identified versus not identified; and (H2) the estimated buyer/inquirer conversion rate is higher when the brand sponsoring the study is identified versus not identified. The findings support H1 and strongly support H2. Conclusion: framing a study and questions to persons sampled by referencing these persons' prior known requests for information about a given brand is likely to reduce interest in responding among nonbuyers of the stated brand and bloat estimates of inquiry-to-purchase conversions for the brand. To confirm and estimate the size of such distortions, we recommend designing-in context manipulations in planning surveys to measure the effectiveness of inquiry-generating advertisements.The very helpful comments by Art Kover and JAR reviewers on an earlier version of this report are acknowledged with appreciation.

Advertising, as currently practiced, ignores all that has been learned by cognitive psychologists in the past 30 or 40 years. Consumers process all incoming information, including advertising, in a very complex yet instantaneous manner. Advertising is not a stimulus in the outmoded behavioral psychology stimulus– response model of human information processing. Advertising, if it is attended to at all, is nothing more than a net addition to everything the consumer has previously learned and retained about the brand. The challenge for advertising is to find ways and means to bypass or upset business as usual in the consumer's brain and to build an enduring perceptual representation of the brand as one that is acceptable and desirable.

In the March 2003 issue of the Journal of Advertising Research, Marvin Goldberg suggests that correlations found in his study correspond with findings of other studies and, hence, suggest a causal relationship between exposure to cigarette advertising (as well as promotional items and American movies) and the smoking-related behaviors of Hong Kong adolescents. In an earlier comment, Robert Reitter pointed out that the study provides no evidence of causality. We point out additional methodological flaws including inappropriate reclassification of data, the need to consider potential sources of bias, and lack of internal consistency of reported data. Additionally, the design of the study does not allow for a test of the proposed theories. We note that the study cites only literature that supports the author's views on the effects of cigarette advertising. The weight of the evidence from the academic literature suggests that (1) advertising does not play a significant role in smoking initiation; (2) advertising does not increase primary demand for cigarettes; and (3) advertising bans do not appear to reduce demand for cigarettes in mature markets.