The Effectiveness of SMS and Other Advertising for Business Incubators - Coursework Example

Running Head: SMS INTERNET ADVERTISING The Effectiveness of SMS, Internet and Other Advertising for Business Incubators of the of the institution] The Effectiveness of SMS, Internet and Other Advertising for Business Incubators Introduction The Internet itself is becoming, of course, as much a medium of promotion as information for the purpose of advertising in as regards to business incubators. Intuitively, it makes a great deal of sense to utilize internet-based advertising to promote newly originated vernacular businesses. There are various tools of internet that are been used today for advertising and promoting various products. As well as targeting people on the move, written advertising itself has developed a new genre that draws its power from motion: Internet texts. This is a relatively new form of advertising, yet one that has already generated a wide range of textual sub-types. (Hughes, 1998) For example, there are simple ‘banners’ pasted across WebPages advertising a particular service or product; there are whole sites run by specific companies, such as Coca-Cola or Benetton; and there are mailshots that arrive in people’s email boxes, in the form of brochures, memos and letters. In addition to these more obvious forms of advertising, there are now, of course, Internet versions of some of the texts such as university prospectuses and church posters (for an example of the latter, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk and click on ‘religion’. Although some concern has been expressed that the standard of advertising has been poor on the Internet and that this has damaged the chances of dot-com companies to turn a profit, there is no doubt that Internet texts can be very imaginative because of the resources available to them for interactivity. What follows is a starting point for thinking about the ways WebPages offer a different kind of read from paper pages. Getting some idea about this will be important in order to assess how online advertising texts might work. (Judge, 1998) WebPages and SMS as Advertising Tools For incubators firms advertising, WebPages are organised very differently from their paper counterparts. In fact, the term ‘page’ when applied to an Internet text is a metaphor. Electronic texts are not formed of pages at all, but we are encouraged to think in this way because it makes electronic discourse seem familiar and approachable. Electronic texts are a bit like a set of Russian dolls: as you read a screenful of text and click a link, you are taken to a new set of information and new links. You can keep going until all the links run out which, in some cases, will take the reader a long way from their starting point (often called a ‘homepage’). This process is sometime referred to as non-linearity: paper texts are described as linear because they are processed line-by-line, while electronic texts can be read in many different ways, with readers jumping between sections of text, between different pages, and between different Internet sites in a non-linear fashion. (Solomon, 1995) As will be inferred from reading the above, electronic texts are often seen as offering more opportunity for interactivity than paper texts. Readers can scroll pages in various directions, can click through to new information via links, can stop a page working altogether, and can, in many cases, save and archive a text in their own files. Interactivity works both ways, however: it isn’t just about the reader being active, since the availability of certain kinds of electronic tools also allows a webpage to be in motion in the way a paper page can only dream about. Animated graphics allow language and images to dance and sing (provided the computer has a sound card, in the latter case); pictures can dissolve and re-form to show narrative progression of an idea; a question can be asked in the text, then disappear and form itself into an answer. Line drawings and logos can appear to come to life, and the only limits to colour, glitter and other appearances of physicality are the ability of the text producer and the capacity of the reader’s computer terminal. (Hodges, 1995) A good place to start for incubator firms for advertising is to go to the homepages of some ISP s (Internet Service Providers, the companies who provide connections to the Internet) or some Search Engines (tools for finding information). These are good starting points because they are gateways to many further texts, so they offer a rich array of different types of text to readers. They are also sites where advertising is in evidence: in some ways, you could see these homepages as similar to entrances to transport systems, as they are often jumping off points for Internet ‘travellers’. Effective Advertising Strategies Having experienced the nature of online texts will be useful now as we turn to look more specifically at commercial advertisements. The starting point here will be the sites of some well known global companies, but there are thousands of other Internet ads you could explore. (Barnett, 1994) To find ads for particular products, try doing a search on the company name on one of the search engine homepages. Alternatively, try guessing the URL (Internet address—‘unique reference locator’). You can do this by typing the name of the product or company and adding .com or .co.uk (some companies will have a global or American site with a .com address, and a UK version with a .co.uk address). If you are in a country other than the UK or America, adopt a similar strategy by typing the name of your product or company, then adding a dot and your country code (for example, au=Australia, fr=France. Other addresses you might have come across inside the UK include .ac.uk (for higher education sites) and .org (often for non-commercial concerns such as charities, clubs, government offices and information services). Again, there will be equivalents for these in different countries: for example, the American education sector is normally .edu). Internet advertisers don’t have the virtual spaces of the web all to themselves, however. They share the spaces with voices raised in opposition to commercialisation and global capitalism. ‘Adbusters’ is just such a voice, articulating an argument against what they consider to be the harmful messages portrayed by advertisers. The adbusters site contains some interesting new texts, constructed as ‘anti-adverts’ and turning advertising messages back on themselves via parody and satire. If you explore the new texts created by adbusters, you will get some useful insights into how the original texts worked. Classifying texts in this way is more complex than it may seem at first glance, because as soon as we try to arrive at a satisfactory system we bring into play important ideas about the role texts perform in particular contexts—in other words, about how they appear and are used. Another complication is the fact that texts don’t always fall neatly into categories according to purpose. Texts are hardly ever simply ‘Informative’ or ‘persuasive’, for example. Information texts, such as university prospectuses, always have an individual or corporate perspective behind them; persuasive texts, such as political manifestos or film trailers, often do their job by the way they present information. At the root of the word ‘advertisement’ is the Latin verb ‘advertere’, meaning ‘to turn towards’. While it is undoubtedly true that adverts are texts that do their best to get our attention, to make us turn towards them, we wouldn’t want to say that everything we pay attention to is an advert. For example, road signs such as the ‘speed limit’ one on the list above try to get our attention as an essential part of their function, but we don’t perceive them as advertising anything. Often, though, our classifications are more a question of degree than of absolutes. For example, clothing in its broadest sense can be seen as advertising ideas about the wearer, but manufacturers’ labels on our clothing are a very direct strategy for them to get themselves some free publicity, and this is no different from the names we are forced to carry around on our plastic bags. (Stevenson, 1998) Central to our idea of an advert appears to be the factor of conscious intention behind the text, with the aim of benefiting the originator materially or through some other less tangible gain, such as enhancement of status or image. So, although a church poster might not be selling us anything in the material sense, it is still intentionally selling an idea—religion—in order to benefit the institution of the church by drawing converts and swelling its ranks. (Hyland, 1998) Of all the texts on this list, the T-shirt is arguably the most complicated. We might decide that it is a form of advertising, but, unless we talk to the wearer, we are unlikely to be sure who is advertising what: is the manufacturer advertising itself on an unwitting subject, or is the wearer using the T-shirt to advertise some quality he or she supposedly possesses, such as party-going inclinations? Target Groups of Internet Advertising Despite the attention paid within advertising agencies to the whole business of targeting specific groups, there have been some spectacular failures to get it right when companies have tried to go international or global with their products. This has been for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, the brand name of the product has unfortunate associations when translated into other languages. Looking at this area can illustrate how powerful the operation of connotation is—the way in which words can call up associations in our minds. Because of the way we make connections between words and particular ideas, feelings and experiences, brand names are crucial for advertisers. They are very economic, acting as little concentrated capsules of meaning. Where advertisers get it right, readers will do the work to generate all the intended connotations. There are whole companies who specialise in offering research on brand-name connotations to product manufacturers looking for a name for a new product, or looking at how best to market an existing product to new, foreign audiences. These companies—for example Interbrand, and The Brandnaming Company—typically organise brainstorming sessions where they ask groups of people to let their imaginations ‘roam free’, from which meetings they arrive at shortlists of names whose suitability is then researched further. (Sadikin, 1995) Limitations It appears that many commercial sites lack the features that would allow the incubator company to benefit from having an exhibit on the Internet. Most of the included features increase the volume of information, but few made use of the interactive, global features of the medium. Moreover, although the sites were complex and content-rich, most commercial sites failed to include many of the navigational tools necessary to assist visitors in finding their way around the site. (Williamson, 1995) Navigational tools, however, appear to be an especially important feature of a site. The only feature significantly related to liking the site was the availability of navigational tools (r = .42, p.001). This suggests that regardless of how much information is available from a site, how many interesting bits of trivia are included, how many visuals, contests, games, or online discussions are present, visitors will have a favorable impression only if multiple navigational tools are available. Conclusion After examining the relationship among the benefits, it has been observed that we should apply a principal factor analysis to the ad by benefit (65 x 9) matrix. The first three factors have eigenvalues greater than 1 and together explain 53% of the variance. Additional factors each explain less than 10% of the variance. The first factor appears to capture the interactive nature of the medium, thereby allowing the consumer to be an active participant. This first factor, which accounts for more of the variance than the other two factors, includes the benefits of letting the consumer customize the advertisement, encouraging role-playing, and having multiple navigational tools available so the consumer can navigate easily around the site. The second factor appears to capture the companys commitment to having an ongoing, online communication with consumers. That is, they offer up-to-date information, they collect detailed information about the consumer, and they include features to enhance company customer relations - all of which require significant human labor. (Krugman, 1994) The third factor appears to capture attempts to enhance sales by providing both sales and brand-image information. This factor includes providing detailed product and brand information, providing such information for other countries, and providing purchase-related information. Hence, there appear to be three components to current Internet advertising strategies: site interactivity, communication with the company, and traditional sales-based content. Although the first component, interactivity, is the most discriminating among the online ads, the benefits characteristic of the third component, traditional sales approaches, is most common among online advertisers. Finally, the examination of product types reveals that sites with technically advanced products incorporated more features of each benefit than those sites with technically simple products. References Barnett S. R. (1994, December 19). "The-big chill: Free speech in advertising", Legal Times, 21. Hodges J. (1995, November 6). "What women want online?” Advertising Age, 30. Hughes J. (1998, March 2), "Auto dealers see future in Internet", Marketing News, p. 12. Hyland T. (1998), "Web Advertising, a year of growth", Internet Advertising Bureau Online Advertising Guide, p. 20a-22a, 24a, 66. Judge P. C. (1998, January 26). "Are tech buyers different? Marketers say new consumer categories are needed", Business Week, p.64-66. Krugman D. M., Reid L. N., Dunn S. W., & Barban A. M. (1994). Advertising: The role in modern marketing (8th ed.). Fort Worth, TX: The Dryden Press. Sadikin P. (1995). Advertising on the Internet: When can it bring leverage to the business? Solomon S. D. (1995). "Staking a claim on the Internet". Inc. Technology, 16(13), 87-92 Stevenson J. (1998, March 30), "Interactive research can enhance new design", Marketing News, p. 12. Williamson D. (1995, August 6). "Digital media future looks rosy". Advertising Age, 13. Read More