The Right Internet Advertising Format (RIAF)

Introduction

Increased access to the Internet has turned it into a dynamic and user-friendly medium for advertising. As a method of marketing through communication, advertising has essentially two primary components: marketing, whose target is communicating value to the customer (Darroch, et al., 2004), and communication, which encompasses creating a united idea between a sender and a receiver (Schramm, 1955; Dibb & Simkin, 1991). According to Sepstrup (1991), the ideal advertisement is the one with the highest possibility of access to a wide range of well-defined audiences (selectivity) that provides good feedback at a low cost. However, mass communication often forces advertisers to accept a wide range of ill-defined audiences that do not provide proper feedback in order to achieve a reasonable cost-effectiveness (Thomsen, 1996). This definition raises a question in advertisers’ minds: which medium has the potential to provide the ideal type of advertisement?

According to IAB, the share of the four major types of Internet advertising studied in this research from the total incomes was 34 percent at the end of 2008. The four major Internet advertising types are: 1) Display Ads (21%) including Banners, Hypertexts, and Skyscrapers; 2) Rich Media (7%) including Pop-Ups and Pop-Unders and Interstitials; 3) Sent Emails (2%); and 4) Digital Video (3%).

Although large investments are made on Internet advertising, the advertisers and marketers are not yet aware of the effectiveness of the various forms of Internet advertisements or the appropriate audience of each. The great variety of Internet advertising formats and insufficient knowledge of advertisers have added to the complexity of online advertising activities. It is useless to recommend that an advertiser use the right format (Heinz, 2004) when the advertiser does not understand what that is (Burns & Lutz, 2006).