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poses a challenge for advertisers who want to take advantage of the enormous growth of the internet. If online ads are frequently ignored by the user, the value of the internet as an advertising medium will certainly diminish.
Another issue advertisers must confront online is tedium caused by repetition of the same ad. As in traditional media, advertisers may have a frequency goal on the internet. In order to achieve this frequency goal, advertisers often need to repeat ads multiple times thereby inducing tedium in the process. Traditionally, tedium has been considered a significant threat to advertising effectiveness, and countering this tedium is important if advertising investments are to be maximized.
In traditional media, advertisers often use ad variation to counter the tedium caused by repetition of the same ad. Ad variation is a strategy whereby ad content is varied while maintaining the central advertising concept. The rationale underlying this strategy is that by varying ad content, the consumer will pay more attention to the ads resulting in higher advertising effectiveness. Research in traditional media generally shows the effectiveness of the ad variation strategy.
The primary purpose of this research is to examine whether an ad variation strategy can be used on the web to counter tedium to maintain or increase advertising effectiveness. This research attempts to maximize ecological validity by employing a series of measures to reflect the real world web environment. For example, experimental stimuli such as web pages and banner ads were designed by a professional graphic designer and uploaded to a web address registered for the research. Participants clicked on a link in an email to view the stimuli using the computers connected to the internet. After viewing the stimuli, participants completed an online questionnaire. The results of the research provide a theoretical and empirical examination of the role and impact of ad variation strategy in the web environment and offer several important managerial implications.
The book has five chapters. After the introduction in Chapter 1,