Introduction
The year is 2005 and to date, the Web has come to encompass some 38 million plus websites. (Zakon, 2002) It is a toss up as to whether any of these websites effectively communicate with their target audience in a manner that is both user-friendly and efficient in terms of brand impact and sales. As most consumer advocates have come to know, digital environments that frustrate users dramatically decrease brand loyalty and can cause consumers to completely abandon a brand community in both real and virtual worlds. In an effort to stem off this flow of frustration, two new digital design techniques provide an intriguing way to increase information flow within digital environments while providing imagery and content that makes users feel intelligent and engaged. These new design techniques are persuasive navigation and open¯ online advertising, respectively. (Ketelaar, et al, 2001) One technique deals with the information architecture of the website, while the other addresses imagery; both in an equally seductive fashion. A full description of each is presented below.
Persuasive navigation, also known as intra-site advertising, is a technique used by digital designers to advertise a given website's offerings (e.g., new content or sale items in a catalog) within the framework of said website. This technique, albeit very simple in its execution, has the potential to help brand managers and interactive advertisers increase information finding success and website stickiness for their client's brand and digital presence. In essence, intra-site advertising incorporates the phenomenon of persuasion with the information architecture of a given website. Persuasive navigation is unique in that it can be easily integrated into an existing website for results that are quick to market and cost effective, or it can be designed into a new digital framework being built for a client. The integration of intra-site advertising, or persuasive navigation, allows companies to provide a robust and well-organized online presence that both informs and persuades consumers to engage with the website. Digitally inclined designers can use intra-site advertising as a mechanism to keep visitors within the confines of their website by prompting them with interesting offers from other areas of the website. The use of intra-site advertising is therefore conceptualized to create higher senses of information flow , or "telepresence"¯, and increase website stickiness for consumers. (Lash, 2002 & Coyle, 2001)
Although intra-site advertising is a design technique that is deployed within a website, open advertising is a type of creative execution that can be used both within the confines of a website via intra-site advertising and on other websites, via traditional online advertising, as a method to draw consumers to the promoted website. Open, or visually rhetorical online advertising is designed with few constructs, instead focusing on delivering a message that is both visually appealing and thought provoking in the same instant. Recent studies on print advertising by Phillips (1997), McQuarrie and Mick (1999), and Ketelaar et al. (2004) suggest that visually rhetorical print advertising is an effective tool for persuading consumers. In order to further branch this research into other media, this paper will focus on the idea of open, intra-site advertising and its effect on information flow and brand attitude. As an equally consumer controlled media, the Internet presents a vast array of possibilities when it comes to the creative execution of open, intra-site advertising.
In the academic context, in order to further conceptualize the idea of open, intra-site advertising, the fundamentals of visual rhetoric, information processing, consumer behavior, interactivity, and digital design must be discussed. The following literature review will present relevant information for each category with a discussion of its relationship to open, intra-site advertising.