PennTags /tag/attitudes+ad

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Young Surfers Spurn Banner Ads, Embrace 'Widgets.'

Emily Steel. Wall Street Journal (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Jul 2, 2007. p. B.3.

Steel reports the findings of a study conducted by a private company in which a survey about attitudes towards internet advertising was administered to 1,200 children between the ages of 9 and 17. Predictably, the study found that children and teens dislike banner ads in particular, and advertising which interrupts their internet use in general. Surprisingly, the study produced one finding which was more encouraging: children and teens did occasionally like widgets which they could use on their social-networking sites. In fact, 20% of teens surveyed had downloaded marketing content in the month previous to the survey. However, a number of factors influenced this. Widgets are more attractive to this population when they can enhance the personalization of their site and when accompanied by incentives like coupons, giveaways, or entertaining tools. Perhaps the most important and attractive characteristic of widgets is that they give some amount of control to consumers, who get to choose what they download and when. Like all advertising, though, widgets have their drawbacks in that they do not necessarily convert to purchase behavior. In view of all the studies which find consumers actively avoiding advertising, discovering one type of advertising which some consumers actively seek out may be encouraging to advertisers.

Of course, this source does not report the methodology behind the study, which brings the validity of its conclusions into question. However, if the results are accurate, they provide a number of intersting contributions to the literature. For one, they examine attitudes toward advertising according to age, instead of by gender or, more commonly, by grouping all consumers together. This distinction is especially important with regards to the internet as a medium because of all internet users, children and teens have been immersed for all their lives in internet use, advertising, and norms, perhaps affecting how they have come to view internet advertising. Attitudes of younger generations will also continue to be relevant for many decades as they grow older and increase in buying power. The results of this study also narrowly consider one particular type of internet advertising which utilizes widgets, instead of internet advertising broadly or only banner ads, which can probably be safely reported to be disliked. This points advertisers to a type of internet advertising which could be useful in the future, as well as to unique attributes behind it which may help them target ads and understand consumers better.

*Because this was not an academic study, I was not able to access the actual study results, only this article.

belongs to Attitudes Toward Internet Advertising project
tagged ad_type age attitudes internet_advertising by efender ...on 08-APR-09

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Online Video Ads Must Change

Red Herring, 1080076X, 1/21/2008.

Moresco, Justin.

This short article reports some of the key findings of a survey conducted to investigate internet users' attitudes and behaviors related to in-stream video ads--video advertisements which proceed, interrupt, or precede normal video content. The findings show an extreme dissatisfaction with in-stream video ads which has led to a portion abandoning the websites they were using when such ads were introduced. Some light is shed on why ads elicited such a strong reaction; viewers of video content like TV shows may expect and be reconciled to commercials on traditional mediums like television, but they do not expect ads in their online content, and are perhaps unpleasantly surprised by their intrusion. In order to increase effectiveness of in-stream video ads, the author recommends making ad content more relevant to the video content being viewed and decreasing the length of ads. This latter recommendation makes particular sense for a number of reasons. Consumers generally prefer minimally intrusive ads to longer ones. The also seem particularly disgusted with internet video advertising when compared with television ads, and are thus less likely to sit through television-length ads on the internet. The article also describes some creative ad placement which may minimize consumer irritation by blocking less of the video screen.

This report is interesting from a number of perspectives. First, it provides some support for the social contract view of advertising by noting that consumers seem less likely to accept video ads on the internet than on television, despite similarities in their use. While television viewers utilize many different strategies to minimize their exposure to ads, from channel surfing to DVR, there seems to be less hostility toward the ads themselves than on the internet. This may be because internet users have not yet adopted a contract in which their attention to ads seems a fair exchange for content. The article is also interesting because it highlights another type of advertising--in-stream video--which appears to affect consumers' attitudes, in this case negatively. It also reiterates the findings of Wise et al. that ad relevancy to content likely increases positive attitudes toward the ad and broadens the context of the finding from advergames to in-stream videos, a less unique type of advertising.

*Because this was not an academic study, I was not able to access the actual study results, only this article.

belongs to Attitudes Toward Internet Advertising project
tagged ad_type attitudes behavior internet_advertising social_contract by efender ...on 08-APR-09

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Enjoyment of Advergames and Brand Attitudes: The Impact of Thematic Relevance

Journal of interactive marketing [1094-9968] 9(1), 14-29.

Kevin Wise, Paul D. Bolls, Hyo Kim, Arun Venkataraman, Ryan Meyer (2008).

Advergames are a fairly recent phenomenon in the advertising industry. As a hybrid between internet games and product placement advertising, advergames use the entertainment value of such games to draw in consumers who are then exposed to a brand as they play. This article investigates the role of the relevance of brands used to the games on attitudes about the advergame itself and the brand advertised. The authors theorize that positive attitudes about the advergame arising from entertainment get transferred to the brand, and that a close conceptual connection between the game itself (e.g. a footrace) and the brand (e.g. Nike) will facilitate this transfer, leading to increased positive attitudes about the brand. The authors conducted an experiment with adults in which half played advergames relevant to the brand and half played advergames that were irrelevent. Attitudes towards the advergames and toward the brand were measured. Results indicated that the transfer of positive affect from advergames to the brand was stronger with relevant advergames.

While the main focus of this article is on features of advergames, this article partially expounds on the role motivation for internet use may have on the effectiveness of online advertising. It shows how advertisements which provide some utility, particularly entertainment, to consumers may be better received and more effective. It also describes a mechanism by which this happens: the transfer of positive affect. It raises questions of how this may be applied to more traditional advertising which often do not serve entertainment purposes. The results of this study may also be used within the framework of social contracts by theorizing that consumers feel an exchange of attention and exposure to advertising for entertainment may be a fairer, more agreeable contract, while exchanging these resources for information, for example, may be less welcome. The focus on relevance as an ad characteristic which may have a positive effect on attitude and ad effectiveness is also useful, and can also be seen in Moresco's article on video ads, which bear similarities to advergames in their close tie to entertainment.

belongs to Attitudes Toward Internet Advertising project
tagged ad_characteristics ad_type advergames attitudes internet_advertising by efender ...on 08-APR-09