How advertising works on the WWW: Copytesting and audience processing

This study addresses three important areas of advertising on the WWW: (1) copytesting methods, (2) the impact of banner exposure and clicking on attitude changes, and (3) various factors influencing people's clicking behavior. This study first tests and verifies the basic assumption underlying copytesting methods using click-through rates (i.e., the more click-through, the more effective). And this study illustrates that attitude toward the banner ad can be successfully used as a copytesting method (i.e., higher attitude scores, more click-throughs). Second, this study shows that simple exposure to banner ads does not change people's initial attitudes, while voluntary exposure to target ads by clicking banner ads results in attitude changes. Finally, this study reexamines several existing theories about how advertising works and develops a model called the Modified Elaboration Likelihood Model to understand how people process advertising on the Internet WWW. This study verifies this new model by examining several variables influencing voluntary exposure to banner ads or clicking of banner ads: (1) product involvement, (2) the size of a banner ad, (3) relevancy between the content of a vehicle and the product category of a banner ad, (4) attitude toward the vehicle, and (5) overall attitude toward Web advertising. For methodology, this study employs a pretest-posttest control group design and uses online survey data collection called Cold Fusion. A total of 961 subjects participate in this research.