Literature Review > Summary
It is estimated that consumers are exposed to over three thousand (3,000) advertising messages per day. Recent studies have suggested that this constant advertising exposure has started to wear on consumers, making them highly resistant to marketing ploys. Consumers feel as though they are being constantly battered with messages that are not relevant to them. At the same time, consumers are more knowledgeable than they have ever been due to the increasing availability of information via interactive media such as the Internet. This presents an interesting dichotomy in that consumers are overloaded by information they don't need, while continuing to search for relevant information that influences their opinion and purchase intention. To effectively influence this type of consumer, marketing appeals need to stand out from the clutter and make a positive impact. (Henry, 2005)
Unlike any other media, the Internet provides a heightened level of interaction with consumers that, when coupled with interactivity, becomes a dynamic medium for persuading consumers to buy goods. Current advertising research (Grigorovici, 2003; Liu et al., 2002; Macias, 2003) validates that increased levels of interactivity increase consumer response rates to online advertising. In addition, research in the area of visual rhetoric has proven that consumers find such open advertising to be provocative and consuming. (Ketelaar et al., 2004)
Since the concept of open advertisements has, to date, been primarily tested on print advertisements, it appears to be a natural succession to jump into another internally, consumer controlled media such as the Internet to further expand this research base. As witnessed in the literature review, individual consumer factors will inevitably play a role in consumer processing of interactive, open advertisements. In addition, various information processing factors will impact each consumer's reaction to interactive, open advertising. With the knowledge gleaned from this literature, the following section will further discuss the idea of open, intra-site and online advertising as well as posit ideas for future research to be conducted.