CHAPTER ONE 1.0 INTRODUCTION Advertising is a form of promotional activity that is used to encourage an audience (viewers, readers, or listeners) to continue or take some new action. The desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering. To reach an audience, these promotions must be published. The process of making information available to the general public is called publishing. An advertiser is essentially the one who creates a product or offers services and wants to publicize the product or services with the help of popular platforms like websites, press, and radio owned by publishers. Publishers either own or manage platforms, like television channels, radio stations, and websites, which are available to the general public. With the Internet becoming a powerful medium for reaching people, it has become popular among advertisers and publishers. Promoting a product or a service on the Internet is called web based advertising, and publishing that information on websites, forums, and blogs is called web based publishing. As more people turn to the Internet as a source for socialization, communication, and daily news, more advertising is done to reach a larger audience. web based advertising is giving tough competition to other types of advertising media. Newspapers and magazines all over the world are facing a great challenge in the form of lost ad revenue. The Internet is not only taking a share of the advertising, but a share of the audience as well. Web based ads can look like television commercials or print ads. With cost per click (CPC) advertising, the advertiser only pays if a user clicks on the ad. This type of strategy can make advertising very cost effective, especially for those who do not have large advertising budgets. Marketers need to find what their major target market is. They also need to understand the timing of the ad. The mechanism of web based advertising is comprised of: (a) method—based on a user’s characteristics and content visited in the past, (b) timing—real time or non-real time, and (c) target—individual or group.

1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY The growing importance of the Internet for advertising nowadays is resulting in the transition of traditional “one-size-fits-all” advertising to personalized web based advertising. web based advertising spending has been increasing at an unprecedented pace over the past decade. Advertising on the Internet differs from advertising in traditional outlets such as television and print in various ways. First, web ads are more relevant to consumers compared to traditional ads. Traditional ads published on television or in print media are made available to all irrespective of whether one wants the information or not. On the other hand, web ads are displayed to users on the basis of their past web based behavior and interests, making the ads more relevant to consumers. Advertisers can target a particular group of customers based on their location, gender, age, and language. web based users tend to perceive ads as self-related or instrumental in achieving their needs or goals. The behavioral ads also make campaigns more cost-effective for advertisers. For example, according to the Wall Street Journal, Pepsi worked with the ad network Tacoda in early 2007 to serve behaviorally targeted ads for the launch of Aquafina Alive, Pepsi’s vitamin-enhanced water. The campaign targeted “healthconscious” consumers and then served them ads wherever they traveled within Tacoda’s network of 4,000 sites. Compared to other kinds of Pepsi web-based campaigns, Aquafina Alive attracted three times the number of consumers who clicked on the targeted ads. [1] With traditional advertising, an advertiser can place ads on TV shows, radio programs, and magazines, but with web ads, there is no limit to how finely an advertiser can target the audience. Due to the rise in popularity of social media, Facebook and MySpace have become hot spots for advertising. An advertiser can target these platforms using almost any criteria (e.g., age, gender, location, education, place of employment, favorite music, and marital status). Advertising companies, such as Google, which targets ads based on users’ search history, have been taking into account users’ information needs related to their interests for targeted advertising. An effective interpretation of users’ information needs is necessary for targeted advertising. However, problems with the accumulated data that describe users’ information needs are huge volume, high dimensionality, and continuous change. Second, web ads can be presented in various formats, such as text, graphics, sound, video, or their combinations. These formats may attract users’ attention much easier due to heir sensory effects. So web ads, such as animation plus sound, may increase the opportunity for consumers to process the ads. For example, when users are reading news on the Internet, an animated banner with flashing text may easily attract their attention. However, in the web medium, consumers are highly active and selective. Whether a type of advertising is acceptable or not depends on the consumer’s perception of whether the ad could fulfill his or her goals. The different formats of traditional advertising are: billboards, television commercials, radio ads, and posters. On the other hand, various web based advertising formats are: banner ads, pop-up and pop-under ads, floating ads, streaming sidebar ads, pull down banner ads, and text ads.

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