Skip to main content

Brand Building: Internet vs. TV Advertising

BY LISA LITZINGER-DRAYTON

September 22, 2014

There are basically two types of advertising: branding (an attempt to influence what people think and feel about a company) and selling (trying to get people to buy a product). Establishing a strong brand association – Volvo and safety; Apple and innovation; Wal-Mart and affordability – can help a company distinguish itself from competitors and sell more products over time.

Despite the steady rise of the Internet as an advertising medium during the past decade, many advertisers still use online advertising primarily as selling tool, eliciting direct response from consumers, and place their brand advertising in other media, mainly television.

Recent research at Drexel LeBow shows, however, that Internet advertising works just as well as TV commercials in building company brands.

Drexel LeBow’s Michaela Draganska says companies typically measure the success of their online advertising by counting click-through rates and sales numbers. “They are focused on the transactions being generated, but may be missing the positive impact that Internet ads have on their brands.”

She and her colleagues collaborated with Google, the Advertising Research Foundation, Nielsen and a number of large advertisers to compare the branding effectiveness of online and TV advertising. The researchers tracked 20 campaigns, comparing TV commercials to three types of online ads: static banners, animated ones, and video.

The results showed TV and the Internet to be equally effective in their ability to increase brand recall.

Michaela Draganska, PhD, is an associate professor of marketing at Drexel LeBow. The paper “Internet vs. TV advertising: A Brand-Building Comparison,” which she co-authored with Wesley Hartmann, PhD, and Gena Stanglein, PhD, is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research.

Read more news
Mentioned in this Story
Headshot of Michaela Draganska

Associate Professor, Marketing

Related Stories

Research by PhD candidate Mithila Guha draws on massive data, yielding insights at the intersection of social media and marketing analytics.

It has been widely thought that brand search volume can predict sales for that brand, but new research shows there is a lot more to consider.

Two LeBow undergraduate students researched how the brain reacts to good and bad Super Bowl advertisements as part of the STAR Scholars program.