Only twenty years ago, the internet was still getting its footing in the world. Not many businesses looked to the internet as a means of advertising their products and services because very few people had access to it. But today, with nearly everyone, nearly everywhere, logging on to the internet, it would be negligent to your business interest not to advertise on the internet. Internet advertising has become one of the major means of putting people and your products or services together.
Because of the particular experience of a user of the internet, the fact that it is borne by a monitor or screen, with interactive capability, and that the screen is finite, in standard dimensions, certain restrictions apply. Let's look at some.
An internet page, which can cover the entire screen, is not a billboard. Internet advertising that treats a page as a billboard might indeed catch a viewers attention, but it is not often that a user of the internet is looking up ads. Since you want your ads to be recognizable, requiring the whole screen means that the same ad will not fit so well in a smaller space where it might have to share the page with some text, or even other ads. Your ad should therefore be scalable, retaining the same branding signals as your billboard ad, but able to fit into variable space sizes.
The wonder of the internet is its multimedia capabilities. Internet advertising can include not only text with variable, expressive fonts and other textual frills. It can display digital images. These images can be anything from your logo to a complex and fine painting type picture. The problem with using fine images is that users have their screens set to different resolutions so that a picture that might appear correct in a 800x600 screen resolution will appear blotchy in 1280x768 resolution. When creating internet advertising images, you will want to view them under different resolutions and adjust them accordingly to appear pleasingly under a range of the standard screen resolutions.
The internet also allow advertisers to use sound, and that is fine if you expect the majority of your customer base to be running on a high speed internet connection. Dial-up connections, which are significantly slower, do not push sound quick enough through the connection to avoid stops and gaps. If your customer base is apt to have dial-up connections, don't deprive them. Put it in words.
The same problem of connection speed conditions the use of video in internet advertising. Yes, you can make your own videos and this, of course, is the consummate means of presenting your products and services; but again, if the majority of your customer base is on a slow dial up connection, they wont be getting that video in any continuous way. A video player might collect the video file, playing it piecemeal, and once collected, the potential customer may play it again, this time continuously, but don't count on it!
Effective internet advertising will take into considerations the medium being used. The internet and your computer may be a power tool for the communication of information in various formats, but it has its limitation. Create your advertisements with an eye on its constraints and your ads may work for you and get those customers who are, after all, not looking to ads to entertain them, but for solutions.