Thoughts:
The overall conclusion that interactive advertising is not superior to traditional advertising is for me as clear as water. For example – when the television started to spread and became a mass-medium, many of the people stated that radio will soon be dead. As we can see today, the radio hasn’t gone anywhere and has maybe even monopolized some places in our everyday lives (cars, public places etc). The invention of new mediums, and with them the evolution of advertising is the outcome of needs of a certain interest group. It is not a step forward, but rather a step sideways.
There are no superior mediums as there are no superior ways to advertise, because people (in the spread of individualism) have taken so many steps sideways, that we can’t universally have a greatest way to advertise.
But still – why interactive media (and advertising) isn’t a superior (as it should be, with its audiovisual content and diversified info) way to get our attention and the decision to buy something. Well I think the internet is a info bank. The TV today isn’t an info bank, it’s a entertainment center. When visiting banks, I’m always conservative. When visiting entertainment centers, I’m not so conservative. And non-conservative people are regularly better spenders aka. better ad-targets.
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The text mainly focused on the study - is interactive advertising more efficient than traditional one-sided advertising. By the authors definition "interactivity is fundamentally the ability to control information". The researchers also divided potential consumers into two groups: consumer who thinks in pictures or in words. In the research, authors believed that interactive media would be bad for visual consumers, because of their lack of interest in textual material which dominates usually the interactive advertising.
Ads themselves can be visual or verbal. Authors stated, that visual advertising is better done through traditional methods, because of the reason stated earlier. In the comparison of the two, the focus was more on linear vs. interactive ways of advertising.
What was concluded was that verbal consumers ignore graphics and rather search for text, and because of that interactive ads seemed to be more suitable for them. Visual consumers liked linear ads more (thought of them as successful) than interactive. Verbal consumers also stated that they liked somewhat interactive ads better.
The reason behind the lack of interest for interactive ads in the case of visual consumers is the fact (according to the authors of the study) that interactive ads tend to be less persuasive for the visual consumers. “Highly visual people like highly visual products through linear advertising”.
In interactive ads, people spend less time and are unlikely to buy the product. In other case, when consuming linear advertisements, more time was spent viewing the ads and greater was the decision to buy the product.
Authors also wanted to state that visual processing is inhibited by interactive system. Therefore, under certain condition, interactivity interrupts the process of persuasion.
In overall, persons will to buy the product was bigger in linear ads than in interactive ads – that means, that the medium itself affected decision? Sic! "When customer uses interactive system, the link between retrieval and yielding to the persuasion may be broken."
The decreased time spent on viewing ads perhaps comes from increased control given to consumers over content, the authors believed. Nevertheless the authors wanted to state, that situation with longtime interactive media consumers may be different.
They also wished to focus more on the roll of sex when consuming interactive vs. linear ads: women are more verbal consumers, etc maybe more interactive ad consumers; men are more visual, maybe more linear ad consumers.
NB! In the study, interactive ads were Apple (computer)-based, where participants were able to control (clicked on ads, to see info). Linear was also computer-based, but more like a TV-show.
Link to the text:
http://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/ideas/pdf/Iacobucci/Internet/jar1998-alexa.pdf
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