The purpose of this study is to provide some insights regarding the Internet advertising Pleasure, IAP. The recent negative trends and deficiencies in Internet advertising makes it imperative to study various factors affecting this area of marketing and explain why people have not enough willingness to click on advertisements. This study builds a comprehensive theoretical model explaining the internet advertising pleasure. By administrating a survey, the paper examined the 288 Internet users' reactions in Iran. A structural equation model and AMOS software were used to analyze the data. A total of five latent variables of internet advertising pleasure were examined: prior experience, website pleasure (attitude toward website), and arousal as antecedents; and attitude toward brand and purchase intention as consequences. The paper found that regardless of “Website pleasure” and “Arousal,” these constructs successfully explain Internet advertising pleasure by incorporating advertising relaxedness, advertising happiness, and advertising satisfaction. The prior experience was found to be the most significant for explaining Internet advertising pleasure. This study offers one of the first attempts to build a comprehensive theoretical model explaining Internet Advertising Pleasure, IAP. Second, this study offers a new scale for internet advertising pleasure with higher content validity.
Top1. Introduction
Pleasure refers to the degree to which a person feels good, joyful, happy, or satisfied in a situation (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974, Hyun et al., 2011, De Wulf et al., 2006). Pleasure refers to the state of joy and satisfaction which can be resulted from some activities or the stand-alone as an emotion (Cornelius and Fulton, 2009). Thus, the state of joy and happiness leads to satisfaction from a phenomenon or event, and in general, the stimulus faced. It is clear that satisfaction results in attention to and perception of the stimulus and thus, intention to incline toward that stimulus. Pleasurable responses when encountering ads positively affect consumer perceived values (Hyun et al., 2011). Bagozzi et al. (1999) suggest that a positive emotion can lead to positive evaluation (recognition) of a subject or stimulus. The emotional content can also be directly processed and affect the attitude of the audience toward a subject or stimulus (Bagozzi et al., 1999).
Internet Advertising Pleasure (IAP) is any Internet advertisement with the characteristics of pleasantness, happiness, hopefulness, relaxedness, and contend which leads to pleasure in users and enhances their positive attitude toward a brand, and their intention to click on the advertisement. There are many definitions regarding to pleasure such as (Mehrabian and Russell (1974), Hyun et al., 2011, De Wulf et al., 2006) and so on. However, IAP did not obtained a unique definition in literature yet. We define IAP as follow:
Internet Advertising Pleasure (IAP) refers to the degree to which an individual feels comfortable with the online advertisement and atmosphere surrounding its environment. In other words, a set of features in Internet advertising creates a situation where the user likes the online advertisement and feels a pleasant sense.
The number of websites recorded in the 2011 has reached 200 million1 . This is while the number of Internet users throughout the world is about 2 billion, over 800 million of which belong to Asia2. Also, according to the report of Internetworldstats.com (2011), the number of Iranian Internet users at the first quarter of 2012 reached near to 37 million ranking first in the Middle East and fourth in the Asia. These statistics indicate that Iran is a very appropriate region to study the Internet and its application as an information distribution channel by companies for advertising or sales promotion. As we know from Richards and Curran (2002) “Advertising is a paid, mediated form of communication from an identifiable source, designed to persuade the receiver to take some action now or in the future.” The aim of advertising can be summarized as creating an image of the product and encouraging the potential customers to buy. Along with advertising, internet advertising “is an Internet-based process by which advertisers communicate, interact with and persuade online users in order to position a brand, which allows a company to promote both consumer awareness and preference in a customized and personalized way, and to decrease the time needed to make a buying decision” (Hanafizadeh and Behboudi, 2008; Hanafizadeh et al., 2012).
Various formats of ads are displayed in the Internet, e.g. banners, buttons, pop-ups, sponsorships, target websites, interstitials, mail ads, etc (Cho as-., 2004). According to Hanafizadeh and Behboudi (2008), there are 18 formats of Internet advertising. In chapter of ten of that book, there are proposed methods for enhancing the effectiveness of each of these formats. For example, see below.
In banners, the primary focus is mainly on the direct response or click rate. According to Briggs and Hollis (1997) and Hanafizadeh and Behboudi (2008), physical characteristics, and the proper position of advertisements in the website will increase the needed pleasure in users to make a click. In this way, there is a relation between logos and pleasure. The more logos relevant to the content of the website, the more pleasure would be form in a user.