TopPreface
Those of us who work with or study online advertising are often asked by other marketers, “What makes online advertising special?” After all, it seems reasonable to expect that advertising online should be like advertising in any other medium. For decades, marketers and advertisers have amassed an array of strategies, tactics and principles that, it is claimed, can be applied to any particular advertising campaign. In today’s technological world, the challenge is to apply that knowledge to the discipline of online advertising, the assumption being that there is no need to claim any special status for a specific marketing effort such as sports, electronics or clothing.
During the past decade, two journals were created that focus explicitly on online advertising: the Journal of Interactive Advertising and the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising. Graduate and undergraduate courses in online advertising have also appeared in university curriculum, and giant institutes such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau, IAB.net, and Emarketer.com have been established to support leads. Plus, the American Academy of Advertising has a special-interest group on online advertising. With the weight of all this activity, we believe online advertising is not a subset of traditional advertising; it is its own definitive discipline of study.
There is a special place where customers gather each day, seeking services and products: the Internet. They want cars. They want plumbers. They want music downloads. They want vacation rentals, lawn care products, tax advice and more. You name the product or service, someone is looking for it online.
Advertising, just like medicine and engineering, is a universal discipline of study, providing insight into understanding the business process anywhere in the world. Ideally, due to its universal nature, that is how advertising should be taught.
Unfortunately, because of the dominance of American textbooks (and European textbooks to a lesser extent), advertising has always been taught from either the US or European perspective. In response, futuristic business schools are trying to incorporate an online advertising discipline into their curriculums in order to position themselves better in both the scholar’s and businessperson’s minds.
The conventional approach has been to offer just a few online advertising and marketing courses; this may result from a lack of appropriate sources. Keeping this in mind, this book is designed to fill the gap between offline and online advertising.
Purpose
Advertising, as a discipline of study as well as in practice, is dynamic, exciting, rigorous and challenging, and our approach in this text reflects this belief. Online Advertising and Promotion: New Marketing Strategies has been written to educate executives and students on how to meet online advertising and internet marketing challenges—both now and in the future.
Designed for marketing majors and MBA students, this book provides solid foundations that are useful for explanation, prediction and control of electronic business activities. Due to its depth and breadth, the text is suitable for any advertising, marketing, IT or business management courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels. We believe that you will find this textbook to be one of the most, if not the most, authoritative source for online advertising, offering a futurist perspective, a comprehensive base of strategies and clear substance.
Overview
This book outlines the changes and challenges that have impacted how online advertising decisions are being made, and how decision-makers are getting their information in an online world. The fact is, marketing, advertising and IT departments have been lax in keeping up with those changes. They have been too busy creating new concepts, or moving to online tactics such as web optimizing and data mining to look deeper into the content and technologies that websites must incorporate to be popular and fast.
This book provides some preliminary theoretical rather than technical insight into online advertising. Online Advertising and Promotion: New Marketing Strategies is a new approach to advertising, and an important one because it not only defines online advertising concepts, it also directly addresses the most common advertising barriers on websites—search engines, blogs, communities, and social networks—and focuses attention on explaining consumer behavior when confronted with different formats of advertising.
Technical issues are far from the scope of this book; we believe there are more than enough books on these subjects. Instead we focus on understanding who is a user, what they do with advertisements, and the relationships that exist between advertisers and consumers. Moreover, we reveal the managerial implications that will help advertisers manage their online marketing activities.
Content
This book consists of 12 Chapters, delving into the subject of online advertising by considering 12 questions:
Chapter 1: Integrated Internet Marketing Communication (IIMC)
Chapter 2: Internet Advertising
Chapter 3: Online Advertising versus Offline Advertising
Chapter 4: Internet Advertising Formats
Chapter 5: Advertising Agencies and Interactive Media
Chapter 6: Internet Advertising Pricing Methods: How to calculate Advertising Costs?
Chapter 7: How Online Advertising Affects Buyer Behavior
Chapter 8: Internet Advertising Strategies
Chapter 9: Advertising and E-Business
Chapter 10: Effectiveness Solutions in Online Advertising
Chapter 11: The Right Internet Advertising Format (RIAF)
Chapter 12: Lead Generation and Behavioral Marketing
Audience
We have written this book with two audiences in mind. The first is the marketing profession, which is always under pressure to deliver better results with reduced resources. Though we point out the deficiencies in advertising, we support advertising as a discipline. Advertising is a major expense for businesses; if advertising is not performing, then it undermines the entire company. Our second audience is the graduate and undergraduate students who study marketing, advertising, business management, IT and computer science. This book directly addresses their concerns about online advertising and is a good source for their information needs in regards to advertising.
In today’s market, a website is a business’ biggest advertisement format, shop-front or storefront. Students of the aforementioned disciplines must have enough knowledge to manage a virtual storefront, much like the front window display at a traditional store. Websites need to attract customers and keep them coming back for more; this book will give these students the necessary abilities to be successful with these issues.
Finally, in order to perform well in our online world, students need to redefine their value proposition as the possibility of these types of businesses in an online world was never before imagined. As Josh Peterson, CEO of Adteractive, states: “… Performance is a way of life. ‘Performance’ is not just how we are measured by our clients and consumers, but it is also how we measure ourselves. Performance goals and accountability are embedded into the very fabric of our company culture; after all, if we aren't performance driven internally, how can we claim to be performance driven externally? Win the war, not the battle.” Let us win the war.