Integration of marketing communications in historical development: informational content analysis of websites and magazine advertisements in Australia

Abstract

It has taken advertisers many years to develop integrated advertising communication strategies that could incorporate many or all traditional marketing communication channels that developed separately, such as billboards, magazine advertising, television and radio. All of the marketing communication channels were usually integrated with one another in order to produce messages that were comprehensive as well as unified across all of these channels. However, the rapid development and growth of Internet communications resulted in the need to review traditional approaches towards advertising to accommodate the new communication medium. Initially (in the late 1990s) there appeared to be a lot of confusion about the role Internet communications were to play in advertising campaigns and whether they were destined to supplement traditional marketing communications or to replace them. It was also not clear how to combine interactive communications with non-interactive ones. The thesis investigated and compared content of both traditional (magazine advertisements) and emerging (websites) advertising communications in Australia at the turn of the century. The focus of this investigation was on the identification of the informational content of magazine advertisements and websites as well as the degree of integration between these two marketing communication channels.The thesis addressed arguably two of the most critical (if not the most critical) areas of marketing communications of the time: informational effectiveness and identification of key informational content elements in both magazine advertisements and websites as well as integration between magazine advertisements and website marketing communications during the early days of the Internet marketing. Informational content analysis of magazine advertisements and websites identified a number of content-related differences between the two types of marketing communications. It also revealed that content of web-linked magazine advertisements was likely to differ from the content of magazine advertisements that did not include a link to a website.