Internet marketing

Online advertising [100], as a multi-billion dollar business, provides a common marketing experience when people access online services using electronic devices, such as desktop computers, tablets, smartphones, and so on. Using the Internet as a means of advertising, different stakeholders take actions in the background to provide and deliver advertisements to users through numerous platforms, such as search engines, news sites, and social networks, where dedicated spots of areas are used to display advertisements (ads) along with search results, posts, or page content.
Online advertising is mainly based on dynamically selecting ads through a real-time bidding (or auction) mechanism. Predicting user responses like clicking ads in e-commerce platforms and internet-based advertising systems, as the first measurable user response, is an essential step for many digital advertising and recommendation systems to capture the user’s propensity to follow up actions, such as purchasing a product or subscribing to a service. To maximize revenue and user satisfaction, online advertising platforms must predict the expected user behavior of each displayed advertisement and maximize the user’s expectations of clicking [28]. Based on this observed feedback, these systems are tailored to user preferences to decide the order in that ads or any promoted content should be served to them. This objective provides an incentive to develop new research by using ideas derived from different domains like machine learning and data mining combined with models for information retrieval and mathematical optimization. They introduce different machine learning and data mining methods that employ deep learning-based predictive models to learn the representation of input features with the aim of user response prediction. Feature representation learning is known as a fundamental task on how to input information is going to be represented in machine learning models. A good feature representation learning method that seeks to learn low-dimensional embedding vectors is a key factor for the success of many downstream analytics tasks, such as click-through prediction and conversion prediction in recommendation systems and online advertising platforms.

Despite increased internet usage, transactions conducted by consumers via ecommerce still constitute a very small percentage of total U.S. retail sales. To better understand what influences consumers' choices to shop for products or services on the internet versus local retail stores, this study tests the influence of consumers' transaction costs, coupled with the risk-bearing propensity of individuals (risk-taking or risk-averse attitude) in a shopping context, and the category of goods involved in the purchase process (such as search or experience goods), which will ultimately influence consumers' preference of shopping medium (such as online or traditional). This research study introduces the construct of consumers' transaction costs as an important predictor of consumers' preference of shopping medium, develops two segregated categories of consumers' transaction costs, namely the individual costs and the social costs, and implements a system of measurement of these costs with regard to how much they matter to individual consumers with regard to their preference of shopping medium. Several pretests were initially conducted to operationalize the variables and their measurement scales, and to validate the manipulation checks employed for the study. The data for the main study was then collected via four versions of the designed and pre-tested survey instrument, employing a between-subjects design, and subject to the appropriate statistical analyses. The results convey that individuals with higher risk-bearing propensity would prefer the online shopping medium, while individuals with lower risk-bearing propensity would prefer the traditional shopping medium. Further, search goods would have a greater tendency to be bought online, while experience goods would have a greater tendency to be bought in-store. These findings bear support to past literature wherein similar results have been found, and serve to strengthen these conjectures. With regard to the effects of consumers' transaction costs, the individual costs and the social costs tend to only influence consumers' reference of shopping medium without providing a sense of the actual choice of medium. Further, the nonsignificant interaction effects of individuals' risk-bearing propensity and goods' categories with consumers' transaction costs imply that these variables do not moderate the impact of transaction costs on consumers' preference of shopping medium. The study then discusses the analytical and theoretical reasoning pertaining to these results, along with the managerial implications which this research bears, and the limitations of this study which could warrant potential future research.

This is a comprehensive study of how Big Data and analytics will be the future of music marketing. There has been a recent trend of being able to turn metrics into quantifiable, real-word predictions. With an increase in online music consumption along with the use of social media there is now a clearer view than ever before about how this will happen. Instead of solely relying on big record companies for an artist to make it to
the big time, there is now a plethora of data and analytics available not just to a small number of big companies, but to anyone.

Tommy Hilfiger is a popular fashion designer who incorporates a unique mix of style, patriotism and cultural diversity into the advertising and marketing of his products. But does his approach communicate true equality or divide Americans through race, class, and/or consumerism? Does his conceptualization of cultural diversity support ideals of multiculturalism or promote principles of assimilation? Tommy Hilfiger's official website, www.tommy.com, is analyzed from a cultural studies perspective to examine these questions. Political economic, cultural economic and semiotic theories are applied at the levels of production, text and consumption to reveal whether hegemonic or counter-hegemonic themes prevail. As a result, it is determined that hegemonic themes of white, Anglo-Americanism and consumerism do prevail, while counter-hegemonic messages of multiculturalism are less dominant. Findings also indicate that there is still much progress to be made in terms of achieving cultural equality in the United States.

Much of what we currently know about consumers' reaction to persuasive attempts (advertisements) comes from studying mass media communications which are largely one-way and image-centered. Internet-based advertising is neither given the focus on information and the ability to narrowly target such appeals (sites), as in direct marketing advertising. Given the emergence of Internet promotions, this is a substantial gap in our knowledge. This research seeks to both extend the boundaries of current direct marketing research (with its predominant focus on who will reply) and the domain of existing persuasion theories and models, attempting to gain a greater understanding of why consumers respond as they do to Internet advertising. By adapting the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) to the Internet, this research attempts to determine if executional cues play a role in enhancing persuasiveness and the moderating effects of involvement. Additionally, this research draws on the substantial work on attitude towards the ad (A$\sb{\rm ad}$), including attempts to greater understand the antecedents of these attitudes and proposed distinctions between executional and content aspects of Internet ads, to see if this rich framework is useful in predicating outcomes for Internet advertising. This research has significant implications for practitioners as it looks beyond atheoretical testing-based insights of what people respond to, drawing on established theory to provide insights into why consumers respond as they do to Internet based advertising. Testing the adaptability of current persuasion theory to this emerging medium will do much to begin building a solid understanding of how Internet advertising works. Using an interactive computer-based simulation in a 2 (involvement) x 2 (argument strength) x 2 (peripheral cue: present or absent) between subject factorial design with 224 subjects the adaptability of existing persuasion research to the Internet was tested. Findings demonstrate the adaptability of the ELM to Internet advertising, as well as the important antecedent effects of attitudes towards Internet advertising on persuasion. However, the decomposition of A$\sb{\rm ad}$ proved less useful in this new domain. All told, much of what we currently know about persuasion is likely to prove useful in developing promotional campaigns for the Internet.

With the increased importance of retailing through the Internet, or e-tailing, researchers and practitioners alike have been interested in the role that trust can play in intentions to transact online. However, influences of trust on intentions to provide personal information to complete the transaction, and influences of trust in the product category, and/or in the brand, on intentions to transact, have received little attention. This research fills the gap in the exiting literature by understanding the influence of product category trust, brand trust and vendor trust on intentions to transact online, a combination of intentions to purchase and intentions to provide personal information to complete the transaction. Hypotheses of the influence of the trust variables on intentions to transact were tested using a computer simulated Internet web-site and two products in a 2 (product trust) x 2 (brand trust) x 2 (vendor trust) between-subject factorial design with replication, and a sample of 422 subjects. Findings suggest that channel trust still influences online intentions to transact and that product category trust, particularly for product categories with low past experience, also influences online intentions to transact. Additionally, findings also suggest that brand trust may be as important as vendor trust in influencing online intentions to transact. Findings suggest that Internet vendors will benefit from carrying trusted brands and from increasing consumer trust towards the Internet as a shopping channel.

The rapid growth and integration of the Internet as a communication and commercial medium into our society and economy has changed both in many ways. This dissertation is an exploratory study of factors deemed significant in the context of e-business success or failure. A survey instrument is used in addition to qualitative data was gathered from in-depth interviews. Drawing upon the literature from the area of new business in brick and mortar (B&M) firms, an examination of the factors that lead to the success or failure of new brick and mortar businesses are examined in terms of new e business companies. Also examined in this study are the business strategies that an e-commerce site should be addressing to avoid failure factors and the types of e-business models that have been employed and have proven to be successful or destructive to an e-business. In an attempt to understand the marketing and managerial implications for the success or failure of an e-business, seven factors are included in the study which have been selected from a group of factors found to be significant in several studies on the factors leading to the success or failure of small businesses in the brick and mortar world and factors which may be considered relevant to an e-business. These are; management factors, entrepreneur factors, product/service factors, marketing factors, market factors, financial factors, and Web site design and efficiency factors.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on viral advertising and study the conditions under which ads become viral, how they are intentionally transmitted by consumers to their social network and their relationship with classical advertising variables, such as attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the brand and purchase intention of the consumer. We first analyze studies focusing on different aspects of the viral communication, "electronic word-of-mouth", "word-of-mouse", "viral marketing" and "buzz" in order to clarify the concept of viral advertising. After clarifying the viral advertising concept, the project analyzes the viral process and its main antecedents and influencers, by taking into consideration emotional and ad appeals theories. The results show that ad appeals influence attitude toward the ad and viral intentions, with humor being the most significant appeal in the context of viral advertising. The study also focuses on the social aspects of advertising and consumption , including influential differences related to the source of the message, social influencers analyzed in the socialization literature, such as family and peers, the tie strength element from the social network theory and consumer market maven traits. The findings show the significance of family communication and market maven characteristics in relation to consumers' viral intentions. We then integrate our key variable, viral intentions, in a classical advertising framework based on attitudes theory and their influence on behavioral intentions. The results confirm previously studied relationships between attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the brand and purchase intentions.

The physical sale of music and the effectiveness of traditional media are expected to continue to decline, challenging marketers to develop new methods to create awareness about music. Although music sales are declining, interest in music is healthy, and strongest amongst the American young adult market - between the ages 18-34. This marketing plan uses traditional and innovative techniques to capture the attention of the target market, which is more culturally diverse and technologically advanced than any previous demographic.

International development literature suggests that Internet marketing has the potential to play an important role in rural development. Despite the abundant theoretical support for incorporating Internet marketing into development strategies, there is little empirical evidence regarding whether Internet marketing actually generates development. This thesis helps fill this gap in the literature by investigating whether one Internet marketing application associated with development, competitive-online auctions (COAs), contributes to growth and poverty reduction. An analysis of price premiums earned in Latin American specialty coffee auctions and interviews with participating coffee farmers suggest that this application's strength lies in its ability to catalyze development; it provides the foundation from which farmers can pursue above-market prices, access new markets, and improve local living conditions. However, evidence also emphasizes that COAs do not inevitably advance development goals because their ability to do so is contingent on external factors, including the actions taken by individual farmers.