Banner Ads

Continuity in Exposure:

Intentional and Accidental Retention

In the paper, "Banner Ads Click with Consumers", professors from the University of Chicago Graduate Business School, summarize their study on the effects of banner advertising on customer retention. The paper specifically addresses a firm's ability to correlate consumer behavior with advertising exposure using "cookies", as well as the differences in consumer behavior based on the continuity of banner advertising across numerous websites.

The use of small files, called "cookies", which are automatically downloaded to a consumer's hard drive once they visit a website (such as by clicking on a banner ad), allows firms to collect detailed data as to the place, time, and number of ads each consumer was exposed to. The collection of this type of data can be extremely important to marketers when they make decisions about their overall online marketing plan, types of ads, and placement of those ads. By examining this data, they are able to identify segments of their market which have been "accidentally" exposed through the World Wide Web, and thus, assist in making better marketing decisions. It can also provide a conduit into various types of "permission" marketing, such as personalized emails, to encourage consumers to visit a firm's site, creating "intentional" exposure. The use of these "cookies", while not all encompassing, certainly allows for much more advanced tracking of the effects of advertising, it does not however, provide much purview into the total number of actual exposures. As such, it should not be considered the only metric by which a firm considers the use of banner ads.

The main point that I took away, regarding strategies to enhance the effectiveness of consumer exposures, was the advantage realized in utilizing a single, on-target message in online advertising. This should not be looked upon as redundancy, but rather continuity in a firm's communication with consumers. The results of the study indicate that consumers are more able to extract pertinent information from banner ads, assuming uniformity, across several different websites versus ads from the same firm, but using completely different banner ads. This theory seems to hold true, especially given our class discussion regarding