An emerging theory is that advertising via the web is more valuable than advertising in traditional media, such as print. Here are explanations for the difference:

The immediacy offered by a website.

An ad/logo on a website presents information about a company or products instantly, with one impulsive action, simply by a mouse click. Compare that to having to fill out a reader response card, or dial an 800 number. Both these approached involve switching media and so risks "breaking the spell."

Pull vs. Push.

People don't tune into a TV show to see the commercials; they don't drive down the freeway to see billboards; they don't listen to the radio to hear ads.Ads are "pushed" on people. People visit a website because they want to be there, just like they tune into television because they want to be there. But that's where the similarity ends. People don't choose to see television ads. But on a website a person can choose to click on an ad, to be "pulled" into your website. This is powerful. You can precisely measure how many visitors to your site have arrived from the Self-help and Psychology Magazine and thus can a pretty good idea of how effective your advertising is for any given week. The advertisers on television don't really know if a viewer changed channels at the commercial break, surfed to another channel or went to grab a bite to eat.

Limits of space and time are gone.

Each successive generation of media has compressed space and time further: print --> radio --> TV. Now we're down to 15-second commercials on TV that don't even pretend to offer content. They simply try to stimulate emotion - quickly. This cycle stops with the Internet and the WWW. Disk storage is available and we can provide virtually endless information if the viewer chooses to visit our library. Now we can acknowledge the intelligence of our readers instead of viewing them as objects to be manipulated through emotions.

Bottom line:

Our medium has many advantages over traditional media.

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