The purpose of this chapter is to provide some insights into advertisements on the Iranian websites. Firstly, in publisher side, is the ethic a matter of fact in accepting Internet advertisements to publish? Second, to provide a preliminary insight into the advertising of pleasant and objectionable products, which one is more? Third, what kind of the involvement (rational or emotional) used more to publish Internet advertisements? Content analysis was used to verify the data. In order to avoid the miscoding of contents, two researchers conducted the analysis and Intercoder reliability used to this goal. we found that (1) all 649 analyzed ads in Iranian websites are belonged to ethical ads and no unethical advertisement found at websites, (2) the majority of published advertisements are belonged to “high involvement product with rational appeal”, (3) the “objectionable product ads” at Iranian weblogs was more “pleasant product ads”. This study by analyzing 1400 advertisements gives managers some insights and solutions regarding to advertising on the Iranian Internet domains.
TopBackground On Advertising
Before starting the study and how we can find the responses of those questions, it is necessary to speak about advertising and how it communicates with people. For this reason, in following sections we provided some ideas and quotations regarding to advertising in order to give you preliminary background on advertising. So, Advertising is an entity of concepts which marketers are be able to use to introduce products to the market, mostly based on formerly created communication. Advertising is based on two premises: the first is marketing, which attempts to communicate and establish a relationship with customers by transferring value (Darroch, 2004); the second is communication, which serves as a process to create a unified idea between a sender and a receiver (Schramm, 1995). In other words, advertising is the process of sharing concepts among people (Dibb & Simken, 1991). However, some scholars like Richards and Curran (2002) are not agreed with this argument and stated, those processes must be termed as “advertising” that embrace “persuasion”. They believe that promotional activities without persuasive cues cannot be named as advertising. Marketing and communication theories have the same origins and thus reinforce each other. The combination of marketing and communication created the emergence of the new subject of marketing communication.
Advertising has been defined in many different ways. Since the definitions are based on researchers’ observational approaches, finding the best one is impossible. In order to find a definition upon which many researchers agree, a content analysis was undertaken, and the following definitions seem to be compatible with Internet advertising. Based on study which conducted by Richards & Curran (2002), “advertising is a paid non-personal communication from an identified sponsor, using mass media to persuade or influence an audience” (p. 63). It is believed that the purpose of advertising is to create an image of the product and persuade the customer to buy it. Therefore, advertising is a part of an organization’s communications policy in its marketing mix. Decisions on types of advertising formats should be made with respect to introducing a product. According to recent studies, Online 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 decrease the time needed to make a buying decision (Hanafizadeh & Behboudi, 2012). However, the question raised here is; do the people show the same manner in facing the online ads? Of course, not, but how they do behave differently? Following parts give us some idea on this matter.