Cross-promotion of Internet advertising: A test of recall of worldwide web addresses in prime-time television advertising

The practice of including Internet addresses in television advertising is relatively new. A central issue in the use of cross-promotion advertising is the effectiveness of conveying the Internet addresses to the consumer. Advertising recall can be used to assess the ability of the consumer to remember the Internet address of a company and then connect to the site successfully. The accuracy of the recall is important because the limited number of domain names and suffixes for types of sites does not allow for every product or company to have the most logical domain name.;This study was conducted to determine the success consumers' recall of Internet addresses included in commercials. In addition, the study was designed to determine whether adding Internet addresses to commercials would positively affect brand recall of the product or service being advertised. The relationship between computer literacy and gender was also tested.;The results from this study establish clearly that whatever advertisers have in mind when they include Internet addresses in television commercials, that is, whatever they hope to accomplish by including these addresses, has very little chance of succeeding. This study is a beginning. It established that the practice of cross-promotion of the Internet in primetime advertising may not be very successful. Ninety-eight percent of the participants can not recall whether a brand included an Internet address in its commercials and 97 percent of the participants can not accurately recall the Internet addresses included in the commercials viewed. This study found that recall of brands including Internet addresses in their commercials is higher than brands excluding Internet addresses. Participants in this study were much more successful recalling brands (35%) than recalling whether a brand had an Internet address or not (2.3%) or accurately recalling the Internet addresses included (3.4%). According to this study, computer literacy is related to the ability to successfully recall Internet addresses and gender has no affect on recall.