HotWired was the first web site to sell banner ads in large quantities to a wide range of major corporate advertisers. Andrew Anker was HotWired's first CEO. Rick Boyce, a former media buyer with San Francisco advertising agency Hal Riney & Partners, spearheaded the sales effort for the company. HotWired coined the term "banner ad" and was the first company to provide click through rate reports to its customers. The first web banner sold by HotWired was paid for by AT&T, and was put online on October 25, 1994. Another source also credits Hotwired and October 1994, but has Coors' "Zima" campaign as the first web banner.
In May 1994, Ken McCarthy, an early Internet commercialization pioneer, who mentored Boyce in his transition from traditional to online advertising, first introduced the concept of a clickable/trackable ad. He stated that he believed that only a direct response model—in which the return on investment of individual ads was measured—would prove sustainable over the long run for online advertising.
In spite of this prediction, banner ads were valued and sold based on the number of impressions they generated. This approach to banner ad sales proved successful and provided the economic foundation for the web industry from the period of 1994 to 2000 until the market for banner ads "crashed" and there was a radical revaluation of their value.
The new online advertising model that emerged in the early years of the 21st century, introduced by GoTo.com (later Overture, then Yahoo and mass marketed by Google's AdWords program), closely resembled the pioneer's 1994 projection. [17, p.12-14]
3.1.2 Types of banner advertisings
Though, as seen above, the large majority of online advertising has a cost that is brought about by usage or interaction of an ad, there are a few other methods of advertising online that only require a one time payment. The Million Dollar Homepage is a very successful example of this. Visitors were able to pay $1 per pixel of advertising space and their advert would remain on the homepage for as long as the website exists with no extra costs.
· Floating ad: An ad which moves across the user's screen or floats above the content.
· Expanding ad: An ad which changes size and which may alter the contents of the webpage.
· Polite ad: A method by which a large ad will be downloaded in smaller pieces to minimize the disruption of the content being viewed
· Wallpaper ad: An ad which changes the background of the page being viewed.
· Trick banner: A banner ad that looks like a dialog box with buttons. It simulates an error message or an alert.
· Pop-up: A new window which opens in front of the current one, displaying an advertisement, or entire webpage.
· Pop-under: Similar to a Pop-Up except that the window is loaded or sent behind the current window so that the user does not see it until they close one or more active windows.
· Video ad: similar to a banner ad, except that instead of a static or animated image, actual moving video clips are displayed. This is the kind of advertising most prominent in television, and many advertisers will use the same clips for both television and online advertising.
· Map ad: text or graphics linked from, and appearing in or over, a location on an electronic map such as on Google Maps.
· Mobile ad: an SMS text or multi-media message sent to a cell phone.
In addition, ads containing streaming video or streaming audio are becoming very popular with advertisers.
- Common Banner Ads - Currently the most common type of banner advertising is by showing the banner near the top of the web page. If this is a paid banner it is usually the only banner ad that appears on the page. This type of banner space is usually sold by impressions, or banner views, although it is sometimes sold by click-thru, when the user clicks on the banner for more information.
- Medallion Ads - This type of advertising is newer and not widespread. A column of multiple smaller banners are shown on the side of the web page. Because so many ads appear on a single page, it is usually sold by click-thru only. This type of advertising gives the page designer less room for content, so is usually only used on pages with written articles, such as webzines.
There are two major types of banners, static banners and dynamically-rotated banners. Static Banners do not change, they stay the same to every user, every page load. Dynamically-Rotated Banners can change for each user.
A dynamically-rotated banner is usually a more effective way of advertising, but it requires a program to work, most commonly a .cgi script. With dynamic-rotation, you are able to advertise a different banner to each viewer, therefore you are able to have multiple advertisers, or, mulitiple banners for one advertiser, or any combination. With a static banner, you can only have a single banner, and only a single advertiser for that page. [24, p.36-38]
3.1.3 Uses for Web Banner Advertising
This probably the mostly likely thing that you will use banner advertising for.
· To sell more of your product(s) or service(s).
· To be able to notify buyers of your new product or service, or offer them a special deal/discount.
· To Spread your ideas about a certain topic.
· To get people to remember your company's name! (Incase they wish to have your products or services in the future!)Advertising on the Web with banners means more sales and/or more influence!
Advantages of advertising independently.
Freedom: If you get to choose your own rates, standards, etc you will have better control over the layout of your site. If you are independent you make your own rules.
More Reliable: You ads don't go down unless your site goes down. You won't have to wind up finding a new advertising broker if you current one declares bankruptcy.
More Profitable/Less Expensive: By running your own ads, you will be able to ask more from the person wanting to advertise, yet your asking price will be able to be lower than what your broker/rotator would charge. So you earn more, and the people who wish to advertise will pay less. Everyone is happier.
Disadvantages of independent Advertising.
More Work for you: Getting your own advertisers and maybe customizing the rotator and/or rewriting one can be a real challenge. If you want to be independent, expect to spend much more time working, and maybe even being a little more stressful. (If you saw how much larger your paychecks would be you wouldn't mind that much...)
More Costly to Run: Having a server that is able to handle your rotation scripts may be more expensive then what you currently pay. It is most unlikely to find an free provider that will allow you to run these simple (yet complex) scripts. [28, p.39-41]
Copy testing is widely used in the advertising industry to assess the effectiveness of a particular advertisement or campaign. Traditional copy testing research methods generally involve exposing consumers to an advertisement and then soliciting responses afterward. Early copy testing methods predominantly used recall as the most important measure of advertising effectiveness. However, multiple measures have been used in more recent years, including recall, recognition, personality, brand image, purchase intent, persuasion, liking, main point communication/playback, and awareness. These measures are based upon models of consumer behavior (such as the AIDA - attention, interest, desire, action - framework) that suggest consumers may pass through cognitive, affective, and behavioral stages in response to a stimulus.
To determine banner ad effectiveness, four copy-testing measures will be employed in this research: 1) attention, 2) novelty, 3) liking, and 4) persuasion. It has been argued that the constructs of attention and novelty are important factors in creating effective advertisements. Researchers have also claimed that measures of likability and persuasion represent a successful combination of copy testing measures that can be used for predicting the likely success of an advertisement.
3.2.1 Novelty
One of the more common means of attracting and holding a consumer's attention is by creating a novel structural execution for the advertisement. In other words, the creative copy should use distinctive, unusual, or unpredictable devices. In this way, it is possible to draw consumers' attention not only to the advertisement, but also to key visual and verbal information. The relative absence of banner ads on the Web that use pull-down menus implies a degree of novelty in itself. Consumers may attend to and click on these ads because of their unusual structure, newness, or novelty value. It is therefore hypothesized that. Banner advertisements that contain pull-down menus will result in significantly higher novelty responses than banner ads containing no pull-down menus.
3.2.2 Effect on Click-Through
Given the expectation that banner ads containing pull-down menus will result in higher attention, novelty, liking, and persuasion scores, it is reasonable to expect that they would be more likely to initiate consumer action in the form of clicking on the banner than static banner ads. Hence. Banner advertisements that contain pull-down menus will result in significantly higher click-through rates than banner ads containing no pull-down menus.
3.2.3 Sampling and Data Collection
The sample for this research was comprised of undergraduate and postgraduate students of an east coast Australian university who had completed or were currently enrolled in an Internet Marketing course at the university in 1999. The logic underlying the choice of sample was that this group would be most likely to respond to an e-mailed invitation to participate in the research. Because the stimulus was a banner ad, it was also essential to use participants who had Internet access for the study. Participants were informed in the class that they would be receiving an e-mailed request to participate in the research within the next week. Additionally, it was reasonable to assume that they would be more comfortable with World Wide Web technology and research than non-Web users.
Three hundred and fifty-six e-mail messages were sent to prospective respondents, requesting them to visit a specified Web address and read the information provided there. Following the reading of this information, respondents were asked to complete an online questionnaire. One hundred and ninety-six people responded to the e-mail requests giving a response rate of 55.1%.
This study was developed as a means of copy testing banner advertisements in terms of their attention, novelty, likability, and persuasion effects. Evidence has already suggested that banner ads contribute to brand awareness and brand strength. This may be due, in part, to the sheer publicity effect of advertising. However, copy testing different banner ad formats may offer a unique opportunity to determine their advertising effectiveness or lack thereof. The limited presence of banner ads using pull-down menus on the Web may be construed in one of two ways: 1) they are simply less effective than conventional banner ads and this is reflected in their minority use, or 2) they are slow to be recognized as advertisements that are more effective. Overall, the results of this study provide considerable support for the latter, with the outcome suggesting that banner ads with pull-down menus result in significantly higher scores on the copy testing variables utilized.
As expected, banner ads with pull-down menus are viewed as more novel and tend to attract more attention than static banners. This is not surprising given the comparatively unique structural format of ads containing pull-downs menus. Results from Hypothesis 3 suggest that banner ads containing pull-down menus are more liked than those without them are. One explanation for this may be that the increased informational content of the advertisement is preferred by consumers. This is consistent with other research by Greene and Biel and Bridgewater which produced similar conclusions, albeit in different media. Further research is needed to replicate the findings; however, the likability of pull-down banner ads is strongly supported by the data.
Click-through rate is an important factor in online advertising with many firms' billing now based on clicks generated rather than the conventional cost-per-thousand exposures (CPM) model. The data suggest that banner ads that use pull-down menus are more likely to be clicked on than static banner ads; hence, advertisers would be advised to use this format more frequently. It is evident that the click-through rates of both groups of respondents are very high when compared with commercial advertising click-through rates. These fluctuate depending upon Web site and page placement with the norm around 2%. They are rarely higher than 10% and the inflated result of this study may be a consequence of respondents' awareness that this was a research project. They may thus have directed more attention to the advertisement than would otherwise have been the case. However, the difference in click-through between the two groups was still statistically significant, and suggests that the pull-down format is more effective than using conventional, static banner ads.
The results obtained from this study lend weight to the argument that banner ads with pull-down menus provide a better alternative to conventional, static banner advertising. They offer consumers the means of gaining more product information without having to leave a Web site and are clicked on more than conventional banners, thereby focusing greater attention on these ads. Although they are still relatively simplistic, like much current Web advertising, these types of banner ad may mark the first steps in a new online advertising paradigm that is based on providing detailed, personalized information to the consumer.
As a communication tool, advertisers, agencies, and researchers should consider the benefits of using pull-down menus in more banner ads. Future developments should bear in mind the informational aspect of banner ads and their potential for providing important and more detailed information before taking consumers away from their current Web site. In addition, it is clear that the novelty impact of these types of banner advertisements can strongly influence click-through rate and this benefit is probably being under-exploited in the online advertising industry. The banner ad may be much maligned as a form of creative advertising, but it is likely to be with us for some time yet as bandwidth limitations are still impeding the delivery of high quality moving images and sound similar to television. Advertisers should capitalize on the most effective means of utilizing this communication vehicle, which may well involve the use of pull-down menus as a prominent promotional tool. [10, p.40-48]
4. The use of metaphor in on-line advertising
This study of metaphor in on-line advertising examined commercial web sites that promote goods or services on the Internet’s World Wide Web. Fourteen such web sites were observed and content analyzed according to the coding manual developed through literature reviews and web site observations. These web sites were sampled for their high consumer traffic and popularity.
The purpose of this chapter is to provide advertisers and marketers useful information when developing an Internet presence. By exploring the current uses of metaphor in on-line advertising, advertisers can gain a greater understanding of their competitor’s efforts and thus produce more effective web presentations for their own corporation. After introducing terminology related to metaphors on the Internet’s World Wide Web, the research study investigates the way advertisers use metaphors to actively involve consumers in on-line messages. Based on the findings, implications for further study of on-line advertising are also examined. [22]
4.1 The Study of Metaphor in Advertising
Metaphor has been used in artistic and literary expression for centuries and continues to be a form of expression used in popular culture at the end of the twentieth century. Advertising, a form of corporate expression, is not exempt from metaphorical usage since it so intertwines artistic images and literary phrases. As the age of information and electronic media is upon us, advertising has penetrated these realms as well, taking with it creative ways to give meaning and message to products and services. Metaphor is just one of the ways of expressing concepts that companies are utilizing in their web sites on the Internet’s World Wide Web. The current study seeks to identify and describe the common types of metaphors used by corporations in their commercial web sites. [7, p.25]