Interactive Advertising: A New Conceptual Framework Towards Integrating Elements of the Marketing Mix

Abstract

The diffusion of interactive media is fundamentally altering the concept of advertising. While interactivity stresses the importance of consumer-marketer relationships, the traditional advertising paradigm may be inadequate to guide research in an increasingly interactive context. First, traditional approaches to advertising research have implicitly assumed that advertising is something the marketer does to the consumer, downplaying the importance of the dynamic role of the consumer. Second, the role of the medium as a multidimensional element of advertising has been largely ignored. Third, a unidirectional conceptualization reduces the potential for exploring new benefits of interactive media in advertising, especially those associated with the development of collaborative relationships. Research in Information Systems (IS) has long focused on the dynamic interaction of information, technology, and users. Therefore, the study of interactive advertising can benefit from an examination of the IS literature, which provides theoretical perspectives that recognize the dynamic role of the consumer in a collaborative context, the multidimensional role of the interactive media, and the advantages arising from technology-driven consumer-marketer relationships. This paper proposes that key elements of structuration theory can supplement the extant advertising paradigm to account for consumer-marketer relationships in electronic commerce and guide research on interactive advertising. Finally, the proposed paradigm can encourage the integration of advertising, personal selling, and word-of-mouth communication into the broader marketing mix.