Advertising is used to promote a product or service, or increase awareness of a brand. It’s a single-effect communication requiring the audience to take action themselves. A reader of a print ad, for example, cannot make a purchase from that print ads. He or she must take some sort of action, such as making a phone call or visiting a store in order to make a purchase. The ad promotes the brand, and the company or the store sells the product. The Web, however, falls between the promotion and sales processes.
A Web site can act in exactly the same way as an ad in a magazine, by promoting the brand and pushing consumers toward a product. In this sense, both the print ad and the Web site exist for the purposes of driving consumers to make a purchase (take action)—they each work to advertise a brand.
The Web is different from other marketing tools in that visiting a Web site is often the very action that other marketing tools want consumers to take. Rather than making the case to consumers to visit a store and purchase a product, a print ad may instead make the case to consumers to visit the brand’s Web site and gather more information. In this sense, the Web is not only a means of advertising; it is also the subject that is being advertised. One marketing tool is, in a way, marketing another marketing tool. The Web offers infinite room for providing information, promoting the brand personality, and offering e-commerce capabilities and social media tools that allow the brand to interact with its market. This offers a far richer experience than a 30-second commercial or one
page print ad could possibly provide.