How To Advertise: An Analysis of Contemporary Advertising (part 39)

The Internet as a Medium 

(part A)

by

Charles Lamson

The Internet has come a long way from its simple roots. While some people assume it is very new, in fact the technological infrastructure of the Internet has been around for about 55 years.

The Internet is a global network of computers that communicate with one another through protocols, which are common rules for linking and sharing information. Although it still seems quite new, the Internet began in the early 1960s as a result of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) plan to create a network that could survive a cold war attack ARPAnet had little commercial value; its primary users were governmental organizations and research universities, and the Internet of today is a far different medium. However ARPAnet was important because its structure, a distributed network, was a revolutionary system. Traditionally, media content has been delivered through centralized networks, in which a hub, such as a TV station, a newspaper publisher, or a cable company, distributes content to many receivers (see Exhibit 1). In a centralized system, if the hub is knocked out, receivers are left without information. But a distributed network is one characterized by many different hubs and links, which allows continuous communication even if some connections stop working.

Exhibit 1

In a centralized network, a hub distributes content to many receivers. A distributed network has many different hubs and links.

There are at least two other important distinctions between the Internet and traditional media. The first is the cost of time and/or space. In traditional media, time (on TV or radio) and space (in print) is a precious and limited resource. Network TV commercials average 30 seconds, which is a very small window, and that window is expensive, averaging in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. In contrast, space on the Internet is vast and inexpensive. Marketing sites generally can store as much information as a company wishes to share. For consumers who require lots of facts before they make a decision to buy, this is a real plus.

The second distinction between traditional media and the Internet concerns the relationship between those who create content and those who consume it. Traditional media historically were content creators while audiences were content consumers. As an example, NBC develops and schedules a show and, if you enjoy it, you sit down on a certain night at the same time each week to watch it. NBC is the creator and you are the consumer. But the Internet, from its beginnings, has been interactive, blurring the line between content providers and consumers. The Internet audience does not just consume online content, it interacts with it and helps to create both a content creator and consumer. In addition, the Internet makes it easy and cheap to promote. 

For example, in 2006 video diary entries were posted by a young woman, identified only as Lonelygirl15, at the popular Web site YouTube. The video showed the musings of a typical but expressive teen about her parents, boyfriend, and life in-general. Early viewers directed others to the shorts, and eventually Lonelygirl15's videos received more than 15 million cumulative views, equivalent to the number of people who watch a top 20 network TV show. Major media outlets such as Ad Age and the New York Times picked up on the phenomenon, eventually raising questions as to whether Lonelygirl15 was real or a clever fake. She was eventually revealed as the latter (the videos were created by two young filmmakers), but the fact that people were unable to tell for a long time makes one thing clear, there has never been a mass medium quite like this one.

Lonelygirl15's video diary entries were viewed more than 15 million times. Buzz about her YouTube contributions even reached the pages of the New York Times.

A Brief History of the Internet and the World Wide Web

In the early 1980s, the National Science Foundation expanded what had been ARPAnet by supporting a fast data network that linked information centers across the United States. At the same time, online content providers such as AOL and CompuServe were building an Internet audience by providing news information, and email services to subscribers. These services anticipated the World Wide Web by encouraging people to use their computers to find information and communicate with others. But AOL and Compuserve still retained the structure of a centralized network because most content either originated with or flowed through a centralized hub. If you were an AOL subscriber, you could not get access to content on Compuserve or Prodigy unless you subscribed to them as well.

Throughout the 1990s, the numbers of people using the Internet were doubling each year. Fueling the medium's growth were the increasing popularity and affordability of personal computers and the growing use of modems, which allowed computers to tap into the Internet via an ordinary phone line. The 1990s was also the decade in which people began going online to access a particular part of the Internet known as the World Wide Web (WWW). The Web, as its name implies, was a distributed network of content providers and users, communicating through a protocol known as HTML, or HyperText Markup Language. HTML allowed for the relatively easy creation of displays, called Web pages, that can be easily linked to all kinds of content, including other Web pages or sites (and later, photographs, movies, databases, sound files, and such). Viewing Web pages was made easy by the development of Web browsers, software that interpreted HTML (and later other code that permited greater interactivity, such as Sun's JAVA and Macromedia's Flash). Although Microsoft was not the first to develop a Web browser, chairman Bill Gates was relatively early to recognize the potential of the Web for his company, and Microsoft developed one of the most popular browsers in use today, Internet Explorer.

In 2018, the Internet is a global medium. People around the world use the Internet to read news, research products, stay in touch with friends, and find out what is new. They are increasingly doing this using high-speed broadband access rather than slower telephone lines, which makes it easy to watch videos, listen to audio programming, and download large files.

In a centralized system such as television it is relatively easy to find content: Sit down, turn the set on, and watch. If the show on one channel is boring, switch to another. Even with a couple of hundred channels, a viewer can quickly find out what is on. But the Web is the home of millions of destinations, available at all times of the day and on every day of the week. The experience of the Web is only partially determined by content creators. Just as important, it is created by its users, who are free to follow their own inclinations in finding entertainment and information.

*SOURCE: CONTEMPORARY ADVERTISING 11TH ED., 2008, WILLIAM F. ARENS, MICHAEL F. WEIGOLD, CHRISTIAN ARENS, PGS. 542-545*

END