Web Advertising

As the internet devours ever greater chunks of the advertising cake each year, more and more advertisers prefer to advertise their product or services as well as public service announcements using internet as internet services provides a cutting edge marketing platform for advertisers. As compared to print advertising, web advertising is able to reach out to more users and also readers. For example, Video is a powerful tool for communicating product information as it is capable to promote new product lines, conduct demonstrations and more. Podcasts allow you to reach out to consumers with tremendous frequency and cost effectiveness. Blogs generate tremendous amounts of traffic: Target your ads based on keywords, to secure an extensive, relevant audience.

Web pages are more akin to print editorial pages than print advertising pages in their complexity and sequentiality. Web ads, however, can be compared to television commercials: Web ads are brief, five-second spots, compared to the thirty-second spots that appear, for example, on the network news. There are severe limitations on story length and complexity, so being clear and persuasive (or at least mighty intriguing) is critical so that readers will not get bored while reading the advertisement and at the same time get the message across.
There are several types of web advertisements and are classified as below:

• Banner ads:horizontal
  
• Sidebar ads (aka skyscraper ads): vertical and scrollable, two to three times higher click-through rate than banners
  
• Pop-up and pop-under ads: annoying to close, but far higher click-through; higher cost for advertiser
  
• Floating ads: even more intrusive than pop-ups—they have sound and motion, and produce still-higher click-through numbers
  
• Unicast ads: a television-like commercial with the advantage of clickability to the sponsor’s site
  
• Other than that, web advertising is more towards the form of multimodal and hypertext.

Multimodal texts are those texts that have more than one ‘mode’, so that meaning is communicated through a synchronization of modes. They may be incorporate spoken or written language, still or moving images or may be produced on paper or electronic screen and may incorporate music and sound(Walsh, 2006). Advertisements with video or flash will be more attractive than the one on print.

Public Announcement of Anas Underground- anti aneroxia community

Source: Youtube Video

Sony Laptop Advertisement
Source: Youtube video

References List:

Walsh, M 2006, “Textual shift”: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian journal of language and literacy, Vol.29, No.1,pp. 24-37

Web Advertising, scientist.com, viewed 29 October 2007,
< http://www.the-scientist.com/about/advertising/webadvertising/>

White, A,W. 2007, Typography and Web Advertising: Making Every Opportunity Count, Digital Web Magazine, viewed 29 October 2007,
< http://www.digital-web.com/articles/typography_and_web_advertising/>