World Wide Web (WWW): NEW MASS MEDIUM

From a dizzying array of new technologies, the World Wide Web emerged in the mid-1990s as a powerful new mass medium. What is web? It is where ordinary people can go on their computer screens and, with a few click of a mouse button, can find a vast array of information and entertainment that originates all over the world. Make no mistake, though: the web is not just singular on-screen pages. The genius of the web is that on-screen pages are linked to others. It is the people browsing the web, not editors and programmers, whom choose which on-screen pages to go to, and which to pass by, and in what sequence. People dont need to go linearly from Newscast Story 1 to Newscast Story 2. By using all kinds of on-screen indexing and cross-referencing, they can switch instantly to what interests them. In short, the web is an interface for computers that allows people anywhere to connect to any information anywhere else on the system. Every major mass media company has put products on the web. Thousands of start-up companies are establishing themselves on the ground floor. The technology is so straightforward and access so inexpensive those thousands of individuals have set up their own web sites. CAPABILITIES AND EXPECTATIONS OF THE WEB The web is a hypertext medium. We use hypertext in the broad sense, including text, graphics, animation, video, and sound, alone or in any combination. Unlike mass media such as television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and outdoor billboards, hypertext allows communications to be delivered in an interactive multimedia format. The multimedia capacity of hypertext permits the use of text, graphics, animation, video, and sound, alone or in an y combination. The use of multiple modes of communication has the potential to increase effectiveness by synergistically conveying different aspects of message in each mode. The interactive capacity of hypertext changes audience members from passive receivers of information to active participants in its construction. Each individual audience member controls the amount or rate of information her or she wishes to acquire from a commercial message (Shimp, 1997). Hyperlinks can free audience members to move nonlinearly between and within messages, accessing as much or as little information as they want in the order they - not necessarily as

the advertiser would prefer. Advertising on the web also provides a variety of opportunities for direct interpersonal communication between the advertiser and audience members via e-mail, on-line chat rooms, and the like. The webs multimedia and interactive capabilities may do more than just add new capacity to existing communication channels. Consumers subjective experience of the web may be both qualitatively and quantitatively different from their experience of mass media, and these differences may have implications for advertising. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB, 2000), banner ads are the most popular advertising format on the web, accounting for 55% of online ads. Ideally, banner ads insure consumer clicking, which links the consumer to the brands target communication (usually the company website), and ultimately to purchase. However, with an average of only 1-%click-through, empirical evidence suggests that the use of click-through or direct-response measures is likely to undervalue the web as an advertising medium. The Internet Advertising Bureau found that simple involuntary exposure to banner ad without click-through generated increases in advertisement awareness, brand awareness, and purchase intention in much the same way as simple involuntary advertising exposure in conventional media. Nevertheless, there is a trend toward site accountability when it comes to consumer response to banner ads. While exposure-based CPM emerged early as a pricing mechanism for web advertising, advertisers have more recently demanded results-oriented pricing in the form of guaranteed clickthrough rates. Such a shift increases the importance of websites ability to achieve clickthrough for its client and highlights the issue of optimal banner ad placement. Thus there is increasing motivation for advertisers and websiteb managers alike to consider the context in which a banner ad resides. INTERNET USER EXPERIENCE AND ADVERTISING RESSPONSE Internet user experience is important to consider, as a large part of the rapidly increasing web population consists of new users. There is big spread among the novel users and experienced users who have several years of experience with the web. The inflow of new users will continue for a long time. At the same time, the existing web population

is aging and becoming more experienced. Research shows that novel and experienced customers differ markedly in their behavior and response to marketing. The same thing can be expected for Internet users. Experienced with the Internet has been shown to influence user behavior. Internet experience was an important factor in explaining proneness to shop on the web. Internet users browsing behavior depends on experience. More experienced users tend to search less and be more confident when online. As Internet users becomes more experienced they become more focused in their usage sessions. This makes them less inclined to react to unexpected stimuli and rush off somewhere they had not planned to go found that experienced users where less distracted by competing stimuli when on a website. This has important implications to marketers, as experienced users should be harder to influence online. There seems to be a threshold effect in hat the greatest differences between Internet users seem to be between those who have used the web less than five to seven months and those who have used it linger. As experienced users are more focused and less willing to digress from their intended paths, they should be hard to attract to other websites by way of banner ads. Less experienced users, on the other hand, should be easier to attract and pose a better target for banner ads. This leads to the following hypothesis: Less experienced users will click more on banner ads than more experienced users. Experienced users are most focused, often experiencing flow, which tends to block out everything else. They should thus be less experienced users. Less experienced users, on the other hand, can be expect to be influenced by banner ads even without clickthrough. This leads to the following hypotheses: Less experienced users will exhibit a greater change in brand awareness and brand attitude from banner-ad impressions than more experienced users.