Web Advertising: Alternative Scenarios to the Banner Years

Electronic commerce promises to further fuse the links between marketing and information systems, making the consumer a key factor in information system design. An increasingly popular medium for advertising is the World Wide Web. The predominant method for advertising on the Web is ad banners, small rectangular graphic images that invite the user to click the can have a material effect on brand attitudes, recall, and recognition (Briggs and Hollis 1997). This paper examines the effectiveness of alternative formats to the ad banner. These alternate formats made use of the HTML images for further details. Though user response (i.e., clickthroughs) is notoriously low, these ads“background” option to produce a wallpaper-like image. We tested both familiar and unfamiliar (fictitious) brands in both ad banner and background formats. Results show that both aided (recognition) and unaided recall were more influenced by previous ad familiarity than by ad format. Also, single exposures resulted in a significantly positive change in product attitude as measured against an unexposed group