World Wide Web banner advertisement copy testing

“Never has advertising appeared so pale and lifeless”, wrote Rust and Oliver (1994, p. 71). Those authors pointed to increased criticism of advertising’s effectiveness as well as lower advertising expenditures. Technological change, the blame for much of these trends, will only increase in the future. A recent survey of leading US advertising executives questioned about advertising’s future (Ducoffe et al., 1996) found that the most important factor for the future of advertising was “new media technologies” (e.g. the Internet and the World Wide Web). The Web and other new media are not merely “fragmenting” audiences, they are atomizing them, creating one to one relationship opportunities for marketers. Consumer relationship marketing takes advantage of computerization to shift from short-term transactional strategies to a holistic approach increasing the bond between consumers and producers. The Web facilitates this communication strategy. Databases target services with directresponse advertising, focusing on customer retention instead of acquisition. Relationship marketing necessitates more, and better, advertising research. Novak and Hoffman (1997) emphasize that new media are integral to the future of advertising research. “Media researchers need to stop working on reach and frequency models for mass media and focus on methods of communicating with customers on the information superhighway” (Rust and Oliver, 1994, p. 76). By reporting the results of a simple pilot study with four experimental conditions, the current paper demonstrates one such method.