Advertising might be defined as individuals channels via which messages concerning a product or service are transmitted to targets. The following advertising are obtainable to advertisers: newspapers, magazines, television, radio, outdoor advertising, transit advertising, direct mail, and also the Internet. Choice of an advertising medium is influenced by this kind of elements because the product or service itself, the target market, the extent and kind of distribution, the type of message to be communicated, the budget, and competitors’ advertising strategies. Except for the advertising perspectives employed by the competition, information on most of these factors is presumably obtainable inside the business.
It may be essential to undertake a marketing research undertaking to find out what sorts of advertising strategies competitors have used in the previous and what might be expected of them in the future. In addition, choice of a medium also depends on the advertising goals for the product/market concerned. With this information in location, different techniques may be used to select a medium. Mention must be made here of an emerging medium, i.e., Internet advertising.
Online advertising is booming and had reached about $2 billion in 1998. Internet advertising offers a variety of advantages. It offers an exceptional ability to target specific customers. Besides, it blurs the division between content and advertising, which the traditional media regard as sacred. If the money is right, many online publishers are willing to strike whatever sort of partnerships an advertiser might want. However, ad rates on the Net are steep enough to justify the cost. Most advertisers pay at least as much to reach an Internet audience, typically $10 to $40 per 1000 viewers, as they would for TV or magazine ads.
Further, the emotion-laden vignettes that work so well on Television merely don’t woo viewers in cyberspace. Presently, most marketers see Internet advertising as little more than a complement to traditional media. Despite the above problems, Internet advertising will account for a growing proportion of general advertising expenditure.
Because the technology improves, the impact of Internet advertising will increase and turn out to be simpler to measure, and also the gap in between this new precise, interactive marketing capability and conventional “fuzzy” passive media will widen. The following reasons are advanced for the growing popularity of Internet advertising:10 (a) The Web presents great advertising opportunities for entrepreneurs simply because of its continuing growth, its user demographics, its effectiveness, and its costcompetitiveness. (b) The overall Web population is reaching critical mass. Recent surveys show there are 25 to 40 million adult Web customers in the United States between one-eighth and one-fifth with the population. Twenty-five million Americans use the Web at least once a week, according to one source, and8.4 million are daily users.
The average user spends8.6 hours a month on line. (c) The demographics of Internet users are broadening, but remain attractive. More women are now using the Internet: one survey puts the figure at 47 percent, another at 38 percent. In financial terms, 91 % of those who used the Web in the past six months have household incomes over $60,000 nearly double the average U.S. household income of $31,000.
Entrepreneurs pursuing certain segments of the population are finding the Internet increasingly useful. For individuals interested in, say, American men aged 35 to 44 with incomes more than $75,000, the Web can provide access to about 2 million more than forty percent of the target demographic segment, and a vital mass in itself. (d) Studies have shown that the Internet is reasonably good at achieving standard advertising objectives, this kind of as shaping attitudes. Nevertheless, it also has capabilities that traditional advertising cannot match.
Features that make the Internet a superior medium include its addressability, its interactivity, and its scope for customization. Advertisers can do things on the Internet that are impossible in conventional advertising: identify individual users, target and talk to them one at a time, and engage in a genuine two-way dialogue. (e) In terms of advertising economics, the Internet can already compete with existing advertising, both in response as measured by click-throughs and in exposure as measured by price per thousand. Moreover, the Internet’s economics look better and better the more precisely a target consumer segment is defined.
The price to an Internet advertiser of reaching families that earn much more than $70,000 and own a foreign car, for instance, could be less than a quarter the cost of using a specialty magazine such as Car and Driver. (f) Like conventional advertising, the Internet needs consistent metrics and auditing in order to gain broad acceptance from marketers.
Both are emerging slowly, driven by old players this kind of as Nielsen and new ones this kind of as Web Track. (g) Advertisers and agencies cannot afford to produce a various ad and negotiate a various price for every site. Standards for size, position, content, and pricing are badly needed and are now being developed; an example is CASIE, the Coalition for Advertising Supported Information and Entertainment, a joint project with the Association of National Advertisers and also the American Association of Advertising Agencies. (h) Unless they location their advertisements on one with the few highly trafficked websites, advertisers find it tough to ensure that sufficient people see them.
Responding to advertiser‘s need for scale, placement networks this kind of as DoubleClick do the aggregating for them, making certain that a specified number of people will be exposed to their marketing campaign.