The Creativeness and Effectiveness of Online Interactive Rich Media Advertising

This field experiment attempts to determine whether online, interactive, rich media advertising garners more user interactivity, measured as click-throughs, than non-interactive, rich media ads run during the same time frame on a major regional newspaper’s Web site. The interactive rich media ad may generate more interactivity with regard to its click-through rates compared with mouse rollovers. Various interactivity theories, creativity literature, and distinctiveness theory provide a framework. The online, interactive, rich media ad designed for this study appeared on a major regional newspaper’s host site for two weeks to obtain comparative data with non-interactive, rich media ads. The analysis of the comparative data used descriptive and inferential statistics. The interactive, rich media ad earned significantly higher click-through rates than the non-interactive, rich media ads. It also garnered more user engagement and encouraged more user interactivity. The interactive ad exhibits higher levels of interactivity, which increase user involvement, as indicated by the mouse rollover findings.