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Internet Advertising: An Assessment of Consumer Attitudes
Abstract
Given the increasing popularity of the Internet as a medium to convey advertising messages, limited empirical research has been published concerning Internet consumers' attitudes to advertising on the Internet. This paper investigates consumer attitudes to Internet advertising, and specifically focuses on Internet users' beliefs and attitudes about Internet advertising. Based on a primary structure of beliefs and attitudes about advertising, the research identified the existence of relationships between Internet users' attitudes towards advertising and their online experience, and a strong negative attitude to advertising in general and the societal effects of advertising, in particular.
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Author and article information
Notes and References
This paper was presented at the Communication Research Forum on communication policy and research, Canberra, 24-25 September 1998 and won the inaugural award for the Best Student Research Paper.
J. A. Kilker and S. S. Kleinman, ‘Researching online environments: lessons from the history of anthropology’, The New Jersey Journal of Communication, 5, 1, 1997, pp. 66–83.
Electronic Journal of Computer Mediated Communicationhttp://www.usc.edu/dept/anncnberg/vol2/issuel/adsnew.html/
Project 2000: Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt Universityhttp://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu/
http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu/
Journal of MarketingProject 2000: Owen Graduate Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt Universityhttp://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu/http://www.yankelovich.com/
J. Previte, Internet Advertising: An Assessment of Consumer Altitudes to Advertising on the Internet. Unpublished Bachelor of Commerce Honours Dissertation Thesis, School of Marketing, Faculty of Commerce and Management, Griffith University, Brisbane, 1998.
G. Hearn, T. Mandeville and D. Anthony, The Communication Superhighway: Social and Economic Change in Digital Age, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1998, p. 104.
R. H. Ducoffe, ‘Advertising value and advertising on the web’, Journal of Advertising Research, September/October 1996, pp. 21–35.
S. O'Donohoe, ‘Attitudes to advertising: a review of British and American research’, International Journal of Advertising, 14, 1995, pp. 245–61.
R. Bauer and S. Greyser, Advertising in America: The Consumer View, Harvard University Press, Boston, 1968. This work developed a scale measuring the social and economic effects of advertising and is the framework from which much of this research has emerged.
Key advertising constructs have been replicated from the research by R.W. Pollay and B Mittal, ‘Here's the beef: factors, determinants, and segments in consumer criticism of advertising’, Journal of Marketing, 57, July 1993, pp. 99-114. Pollay and Mittal proposed a comprehensive seven-factor model of consumer attitudes towards advertising, which includes three personal utility factors (product information, social image information and hedonic amusement) and four socio-economic factors (good for economy, fostering materialism, corrupting values and falsity/no-sense).
Internet Research, ‘Communication and the net’, Internet Research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy, 6, 1, 1996, pp. 29–30.
Hoffman, op. cit., see Note 6.
The research commenced in 1996, and the data was collected between October 1997 and February 1998.
Ducoffe in his paper cited above presented empirical findings from an intercept survey focusing on the perceived value of Web advertising to consumers and discusses value perceptions that relate to key consequent constructs, attitudes toward advertising in general and attitudes to individual ads; R. Mehta and E. Sivadas, ‘Direct marketing on the Internet: an assessment of consumer attitudes’, Journal of Direct Marketing, 9, 3, 1995, pp. 66-83, presented empirical findings on direct marketing on the Internet, prior to the World Wide Web explosion, and primarily focused on advertising in newsgroups; I. Maignan, ‘Nature and uses of the Internet: a qualitative inquiry’, Proceedings of the American Marketing Association Educators’ Conference, Enhancing Knowledge Development in Marketing, American Marketing Association, 1996, pp. 44-5 questioned interviewees about commercial activity on the Internet and developed social use of technology categories, to ascertain purposes, and or an intuitive purpose for using Internet technologies.
O'Donohoe, op. cit., p. 247.
Mehta and Sivadas, op. cit., surveyed newsgroups to ascertain attitudes toward advertising and direct marketing in Internet newsgroups.
Ibid.
In this research, Internet users online experience was calculated as ‘time online’.
Essentially, the research utilises the classical measures of perceived social and economic effects of advertising, originally proposed by Bauer and Greyser in 1968 in their study ‘Advertising in America: the consumer view’. These measures were adapted by Pollay and Mittal to be included in a survey instrument, which surveyed Americans about their attitudes towards advertising in general. Bauer and Greyser's research created a benchmark for subsequent studies concerning attitudes towards advertising by establishing a fundamental tool for measuring the economic and social role or effects of advertising (Pollay and Mittal, op. cit., p. 100). These are principle constructs, which researchers in the past (J. C. Andrews, ‘The dimensionality of beliefs towards advertising in general’, Journal of Advertising, 18, 1, 1989, pp. 26-35; and L. N. Reid and L. C. Soley, ‘Generalised and personalised attitudes towards advertising's social and economic effects’, Journal of Advertising, 11, 3, 1982, pp. 3-7) have argued, convey consumers overall attitudes towards advertising in general.
Pollay and Mittal, op. cit.
D. Muehling, An investigation of factors underlying attitude-toward-advertising-in-general’, Journal of Advertising, 16, 1, 1987, pp. 32–40.
W. L. Neuman, Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, 2nd edn, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 1994; D. Tull and D. Hawkins, Marketing Research: Measurement and Method, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1993.
Pollay and Mittal, op. cit.
Journal of Computer Mediated Communicationwww.usc.edu/dept/annenberg/vol3/issuel/smith.html
Convenience sampling of university students creates sample biases in the research. However, the limitations of student sampling were considered minimal, as a great deal of research on the structure of attitudes towards advertising is based on student samples (O'Donohoe, op. cit). Holbrook (1978, cited in O'Donohoe) argued that student's psychological processes and attitude structures should not differ dramatically from those of the broader consumer population. However, other researchers have disagreed and challenge the validity of research based on student samples (e.g. W. D. Wells, ‘Discovery-oriented consumer research’, Journal of Consumer Research, 19, 1993, pp. 489-504). Nevertheless, when it is borne in mind that response rates to sample surveys are often low and declining (Goyder, cited in A. Bryman and D. Cramer, Quantitative Data Analysis with SPSS for Windows: A Guide for Social Scientists, Routledge, London, 1997, p. 104) ‘the difference between research based on random samples and convenience samples in terms of their relative representativeness is not always as great as is sometimes implied’.
B. Fisher, M. Margolis and D. Resnick, ‘Breaking ground on the virtual frontier: surveying civic life on the Internet’, The American Sociologist, Spring 1996, pp. 11–29.
O'Donohoe, op. cit., p. 247.
L. M. Maddox and D. Mehta, ‘The role and effect of Web addresses in advertising’, Journal of Advertising Research, March-April 1997, pp. 47–59.
Ducoffe, op. cit.
Ibid.