Abstract
A Study on the effect of Internet Banner Advertising
Jung Jung-reui
Dept. of International mass communication
Graduate School of International Studies
Kyonggi University
The number of internet users and the extent of marketing advertisements are growing exponentially. As if in response to this trend, the importance of online advertisement, in particular the internet advertisement, has gotten so bigger that it is being projected that 6.57 bilion dollars worldwide and over 61.4 billion won just in Korea will be spent for it by the year 2000. As if a support to this forecast, according to the results of the ACR research conduced together by 5 domestic advertising agencies in June, 1999, in the category of people's preference for the most likable media and the most entertaining media, internet rated second right after TV. If its development continues at this speed, it seems that, sooner or later, internet advertisement will entrench itself as a third advertising tool after TV and newspaper among mass media. In addition, it is expected that the rapid information and the progression of many network cables such as ADSL, Thrunet, and Dreamline which will shorten communication time will further spur the electronic data-transfer speed and thus accelerate the expansion of internet advertisement.
In particular, with the government's policy that PC and internet should be included in the elementary school curriculum, the affected parents are producing what it calls "a phenomenon of housewives' holding the mouse" and it is a fact that if apartments or any structures recently built do not introduce Cyber conception, they cannot get good grades in a quality evaluation session. Under this situation it is easily presumed how fast the expansion of internet advertising market will occur and how wide it will be.
The reality of internet advertising market with this seemingly rosy future, however, in fact contains a lot of problems. There are many problems to be solved for the internet to become an effective marketing tool for clients satisfying their anticipation, for example, its relatively fast decreasing CPM compared to the existing tools, general lack of understanding about its advertisement effect, and burden of new skills which are changing so quickly in so little intervals.
Among these problems the biggest obstacle unanimously voiced by the people in this industry is the fact that there is no reasonable yardstick to measure the effect of the internet advertisement in itself. It is a fact that a good number of companies are currently putting up their banners on famous websites, but there have been no way to precisely verify how successful the results of their ads actually were, or how cost-effective they were compared to the existing 4 media, due to indistinctness or absence of the standard to measure its effectiveness.
While many advertising people point out the advantages of internet ads, such as target marketing based faithfully on the individual customer information and cyber marketing with no boundaries of time and space, they are still applying the same way of effect measurement and the same cost model in medium assessment to them as to the existing media.
In this thesis I examined the present situation of internet market focusing on the domestic market, and dealt with the ways to measure the various internet advertising activities and the ensuing matter of their cost-effectiveness.
I compared and examined the efficiency of banner ads among other internet advertisements and, as a means of comparison, adopted the method of CPM(Cost per Mill) which is recently much used for the measurement of effectiveness and compared TV, newspaper, and internet banner ads with each other.
As a result, according to the resulting numbers, the cost of the CPM of internet banner ads turned out to be lower than the ones of the other media compared. And in terms of narrowed targets, and the values as a basic source for future marketing activity with database built and as an interactive communication medium, the internet ads can be said to have enough merit as a future advertising tool differentiated from the 4 media which provide ads one-way to the unspecified public.
Nevertheless, there should be suggested some points, or some problems, to be improved in the banner ads on websites, that is, whether an ad is exactly delivered to the intended target conceived by the client when there are so many websites and so many internet users, how to deal with the matter of upgrading various contents which are changing at a great speed so as to provide timely and flexible information, how to carry out an accurate traffic research used to observe the internet user's habit which is as fluid as real surfing itself to get concrete results, whether there is a way to turn the user's rejection caused by the excessive exposure to ads into affection, how to find out the way to prevent in advance the ignorance of or the diminished attention level for the internet ads caused by installation of banner ads blocking programs by users or by over-crowded banners on one page, and what procedures to be taken to make some internet-resistant group adjusted to this environment.
In this thesis, I suggested some solutions to improve the above-mentioned problems, which are the development of the proper Media Mix in which 4 media are combined with the unique characteristics of internet ads, the effort to attract user's attention through quality improvement of banner ads designed with creative idea rather than the mere exposure to ads with plain texts, a plan to increase attention rate by controling the exposure frequency using the measurement of user's fatigue caused by too much ad contact, the standardization of the sizes of ads and the adjustment of display location of ads which have by and large appeared in a loose and coarse way, and the PUSH method in which, using the input data of users(hobby, talent, major interests, and so on) which were collected in return for the services of the site or in the form of mutual exchange of information, we can expose users to the tailored ads likely to attract their attention.
Lastly, it remains to more advanced future researches to improve the ways to lead all these activities to an actual sale, on which current banner ads have limitations.
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