This is the summary of an article by Mehdi Behboudi, et al. It identifies the factors that affect the success of advertising agencies in the online community by reviewing such external variables as sponsorship ads, lead generation, creativity, account management, and others. A questionnaire was developed which was answered by students from Iran. All the variables have been found to have significant effects, with creativity being the most influential among the variables. You can get the pdf of the behavioral targeting article here: A Review of the Activities of Advertising Agencies in Online World.
After four years, the Internet already has fifty million audiences. It took thirty eight years for the radio to achieve this number, and TV, 13 years. Indeed, the internet is a challenging marketing channel, but it is a huge opportunity. Internet advertising revenues for 2011 in the U.S. reaches 7.3 billion dollars, a 23 percent increase from 2010.
The Internet advertising medium is interactive and many-to-many, and seems to be a more effective way to advertise than using mass medium advertising. The effectiveness of advertising is obviously directly related to the intermediate agency or medium that prepares it. These agencies prioritize client satisfaction. In the case of the Internet advertising channel, which is interactive, advertising agencies can use the comments that consumers make about the products being advertised to further enhance client satisfaction.
This study asks the following questions:
1. Which factors result in ad agencies’ success in the Internet?
2. What are the key antecedents of an ad agency?
Hypotheses
Creativity
Creativity is especially important in online banner advertisements and is directly connected to ad effectiveness. A publisher aims to increase frequency and reach, while advertising agencies are tasked to provide the creativity, being one of the primary characteristics of advertising. Creativity results in a more positive response from the market. This study hypothesizes that building facilities to generate creative ideas has a direct effect on advertising agencies’ performance in online world.
Relationship Management
Good relationships in the agency management are characterized by good communication among personnel, and agency towards the client and competitors. The primary concept in relationship forming is personal behavior. Agencies should have a suitable relationship with their clients. The study hypothesizes that rebuilding relationship management process in activities reviewed will result in the effectiveness of agencies.
Sponsorship advertisement
Sponsorship advertisements seem to be a part of website content and are located in various key parts of a webpage in the form of lists. Another hypothesis is, the ability to use sponsorship advertising and promoting agency’s role on the internet will make it more effective.
Direct Mail
Direct mail can be a cheap and cost-effective way to promote brands, and a personal way of communicating to customers. Direct mail can be in the form of testimonials, brochures or newsletters, which allow prospect clients to learn more about an agency. This study hypothesizes that the ability to use and execute direct mail will make advertising agencies more effective and improve their internet-related activities.
Uncluttered homepage
Advertising agencies should design their homepage so that all the information that their clients need to know can be accessed easily. Navigating across the page should be easy, and so the hypothesis goes: designing uncluttered homepages will result in effectiveness and improvement of advertising agencies’ activities in the Internet.
Account managers’ new roles
Account managers are responsible for developing constant relationships with clients. Developing personal relationships among the agency and its clients is deemed by some researches as the most important activity used to generate new business. Thus, another hypothesis states that personal and organizational ability of account manager plays a serious role in effectiveness and improvement of advertising agencies’ activities on the Internet.
Lead Generation
Essentially, advertising agencies should have better knowledge regarding tracing, behavioral marketing, behavioral targeting, and lead generation. One of the fasting growing web trends is lead generation, and has the highest growth level among other forms of online advertising. Therefore, the final hypothesis states that adopting and using lead generation concept will result in effectiveness and improvement of advertising agencies’ activities in the internet.
Conceptual Model
The factors mentioned above were identified through content analysis conducted on twenty two earlier studies about internet advertising, e-business, online marketing, and new small and medium enterprise technologies. A self-administered questionnaire was then created, with questions in a 5-scale Likert format, ranging from extremely disagree to extremely agree. One hundred ninety three experts received questionnaires, of which 126 responded.
A pre-test was done to estimate validity and reliability. Initial ambiguities that were resolved includes introducing operational definitions to define concepts such as lead generation. Also, the questionnaire is highly reliable according to the 72 percent score obtained using a Cronbach’s alpha test.
Results in the study have shown that all hypotheses are met and were retained in the model.
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