Promotion 421
television, radio and cinema, and to extend the
concept ‘media owner’ to embrace any organiza-
tion with selling rights to time and space in those
new media. Then, a banner advertisement
encountered while visiting a website can be
thought of as in many ways the cyber-equivalent
of a poster glimpsed among the visual clutter of a
modern urban environment. They are simply
different manifestations of a single ingredient of
the mix, in the same way as a telesales call or a
‘junk’ e-mail message are no more than modern
variations on the traditional mail shot as vehicles
for direct marketing initiatives.
Percy (2001) concurs that the impact of the
Internet is ‘unlikely to be as revolutionary as
the current climate of excitement would sug-
gest’ and expects that ‘people will process
marketing communication on the Internet
much as they process all marketing commu-
nications’. The definitive price list for advertis-
ing space and time in the UK, British Rate and
Data, simply lists ‘new media’ alongside eight
other media categories, such as national news-
papers and cinema.
Furthermore, because readers of The Mar-
keting Book are likely to have more or less
unlimited free access to the Internet by virtue of
its rapid proliferation in the business and
academic communities, they will tend to over-
estimate the extent of its penetration into
several important audiences for promotional
messages – for example, the inveterate pack-
age-holiday consumers in the ‘grey market’ or
those ‘housewives’ who fill the supermarket
trolley with branded goods. In fact, uptake of
the Internet in the UK and the rest of Europe
has not yet been as great or as fast as generally
predicted in general society, beyond the inno-
vators (‘anoraks’, ‘geeks’, ‘nerds’ and their kin)
and early adopters (those working in IT-rich
environments). The NOP Internet User Profile
2000 shows that just over 19 million individuals
in the UK had ‘tried the Internet’ over an
unspecified 12-month period, a figure that
corresponds to just under a third of the total
population (31.9 per cent) and rather less than
half of all households (40.9 per cent). The same
survey found that almost 16 million people
over the age of 15 had ‘used the WorldWide
Web’ during the four weeks before December- The apparent discrepancy is explained by
the fact that dominant use of the Internet is to
access e-mail services, not to browse the web.
According to the UK government’sSocial Trends
survey for 2001, that accounts for a third of all
traffic.
The prevailing belief that Internet users are
dominantly young and male also requires some
qualification. The NOP survey found that the
male–female split was 58:42, that 25- to
44-year-olds accounted for roughly half of all
usage, and that the number of users aged 45 or
over outnumbered those under 25 by the
significant margin of 29 per cent to only 23.
Though this combination of innovators
and early adopters, whoever they may be, will
soon be joined by the early majority, it may take
another decade or more for technophobes and
traditionalists to become the minority.
Meanwhile, access is by no means the same
thing as exposure to the promotional message.
Internet-linked computers are often used as
nothing more than word processors or record
keepers, and the exchange of personal or
business e-mail messages accounts for well over
half all Internet traffic. Users have to elect to
browse the Net before they become part of an
advertiser’s actual audience. To find and read a
marketer’s website requires a positive search,
among a great deal of competing non-commer-
cial material. Therefore, sensible advertisers seek
to counteract the random nature of exposure by
including a web address in their media advertis-
ing. From the potential customer’s point of view,
this offers the benefit that pre-purchase informa-
tion can be obtained anonymously, rather than
by requesting literature or being subjected to a
sales pitch at the point of sale.
However, there is a counter-productive
tendency among many advertisers seeking to
harness the potential of the Internet to create
over-designed websites which take so long to
download on the average PC, or are so diffi-
cult to navigate around, that ‘visitors’ depart