WORKSHOP 9: Persuading and Arguing

Workshop 9
Part One: On Persuasion in Web Advertising

Like magazine advertisers, web advertisers pay for the privilege of selling products on a web site. In terms of its layout on the web page, the advertisements, usually called banners, can look very similar to advertising in print. But their method of selling is quite different. In addition to the uses of color, image, and words that appear in print advertisements, web banners are usually animated and can present several different banners, each advertising a different product. The information a site knows about you -- what pages you are visiting, how long you are staying there, whether you've clicked on any banners previously -- affects the kinds of advertisements that you see. More often than not, the banner that you see at the top of a web page will not be there the next time you visit the same web page. Whereas magazine readers are engaged in an activity of leisure, people browsing the web are usually hunting for something. If a banner is going to catch their attention, it must communicate its message quickly. Magazine ads, on the other hand, can ask their readers to course through a paragraph of text.

Web banners, therefore, tend to be flashy and compact. They often hold something in common with neon signs in Las Vegas, but they can be quite clever and subtle. For this exercise, we'd like you to find a few web banners which you think are unusually persuasive. Maybe you yourself don't find them persuasive, but you can imagine that someone would find them persuasive. You are welcome to go to any site to begin looking for banners, but a convenient place to start is at a search engine, since they often feature several advertising banners.

When you find one that you'd like to use, do NOT click on any other link. Do NOT use the forward or backward icons on your browser. Instead, open a new browser window (under the File menu option) to look for your next ad. Once you have found that one, open another window for your third ad. When you have found all of your banners, you should have a browser window for each one. Just to be safe, you should save an image of each one onto your computer:

• Right-click on the picture (on Macintosh computers click and hold down your mouse over the picture)
• in the menu that appears, select "save file as"
• find an appropriate directory and save the picture

You will lose any animation that exists in the online version, but at least you will have a snapshot.

In your attempt to define what is persuasive about the ad, ask yourself the following questions:

• Why is this product advertised in this web site? Is there any correlation between the content of the site and the product? If you were performing a search when the banner came up, are your search terms in any way related to the banner?
• Does the advertising banner try to look less like a banner and more like just another section of the web site?
• Is it offering you a discount, a free product, or a gift certificate? What do they hope to gain in return? You may have to click on the ad to find this last answer out. DON'T do this until you are more or less finished looking at it (since when you return to the banner, the ad will almost certainly be gone).

When you have determined what makes each of your ads particularly persuasive, draw some general conclusions about persuasion in web advertising. Discuss your conclusions with a group of students in your class (this can take place in the discussion list for this online workshop or orally). If other people have drawn different conclusions, ask them questions until you determine whether you agree or not. Ultimately, your group should come up with some principles about what makes a persuasive online banner. You should then share these principles with the rest of the class.