ABSTRACT
Businesses are increasingly flocking to the Internet for a variety of marketing purposes, including research, publicity, sales, and advertising. By April 1996, about 256,000 commercial domains were registered on the Internet with spending on Internet advertising expected to grow from $74 million in 1996 to $2.6 billion by the year 2000 (Narisetti, 1996). At the beginning of 1996, more than 50 of the Leading 100 National Advertisers (LNAs) had established corporate homepages (sites) on the Internet’s World Wide Web (“Big biz,” 1995). Although many large advertisers and their agencies have been criticized for being slow to embrace marketing on the Web, many LNAs on the Web have incorporated state-of-the-art features into their sites, creating addresses laden with graphics, company, product, and service information, links to related web sites, embedded e-mail, interactive games, and so on (Beatty, 1995, 1996b; Goldman, 1995a; Hodges, 1996; Rigdon, 1995). Trade reports indicate that moving into interactive/ multimedia advertising dominates advertising agency future expansion plans (Beatty, 1996a).
