Factors Affecting Consumer Attitude Toward Advertisement on the Web and Print Media

Internet advertisement has been growing rapidly in recent years. Theoretically, with the feature of wide-accessibility, information richness, multimedia presentation, and flexible interaction, advertising on the web is believed to be more attractive than on the traditional media, such as printed newspapers and televisions. In reality, however, the effect of advertisements over the web has not been fully realized. Less and less click ratios are reported. Therefore, it is interesting to know what are the factors that influence the attitude of readers and what kind of web advertisements may be more effective. This paper reports findings from a controlled lab experiment on the effect of media characteristics, advertising appeals, and product involvement on consumer attitudes toward advertisement on different media. The results indicate that: (1) dynamic Web presentation that uses animation can improve advertising effect significantly but providing interactions does not, (2) product involvement does not have significant impact on advertising effect, (3) appeals in advertising along has very limited impact on advertising effect, but the combination of dynamic presentation with emotional appealing is more effective than others.