The Internet and World Wide Web are constantly evolving with enormous speed, both in population and in technology ( high-speed cable modems, much cheaper processing and data storage and improvements in compression ). Due to digitalization, images, sound and text can easily be transferred via computers from one place to another and services can be performed all over the world, depending on the place of their best value. As a result, the Internet has become a global medium with a great potential of advertising, commerce, and also to link communications. More and more companies are discovering Internet as a new media to promote their products and services. Advertisers who are always looking for an audience to show their wares to come to the Internet as more people congregate there. According to the fourth annual survey from the US Association of National Advertisers (ANA) already two thirds of US companies advertise online while spending on online advertising in the US tripled in 1999, with each company devoting almost USD 2 million to Internet advertising.
　　The most common advertisement style that is used today by Web sites is the ad banner. The ad banner is displayed somewhere on the page, and it might be surrounded by other images and icons that also attract attention. Since their first appearance on commercial Web pages, the value of banner ads has been debated. Many felt they were physically too small to offer much branding and some advertisers convinced themselves that click-through was the only metric by which to measure ad effectiveness and that without a click-through, no brand building would occur. But research showed that banners are very effective in building brand awareness. Surfers may not click on a banner, but if they see it enough times, the company's name is drilled into their head, and think of it at some later time when they are in a shopping mode. Many advertisers have developed a clear and concise brand message or theme that consumers have heard any number of times: "Amazon.com: Earth's biggest bookstore" for example. The clear and concise message is important if the advertiser is to lock a brand message into consumers' long-term memory and have them recalled in the appropriate circumstance. In general, these messages can be communicated within a Web ad banner and do not require the consumer to transfer over to a Web site for additional elucidation. The exposure alone has value.
　　The impact of banners on brand awareness was tested for the first time in fall 1996 by Millward Brown International. Three brands were tested including a men's apparel brand, a telecommunications brand and a technology company. The findings were significant and conclusive for each brand. Awareness was significantly greater among the banner-exposed (test) group than the non-exposed (control) group. Specifically, exposure to the ad banners alone increased brand awareness from 12% to 200% in a banner-exposed group. The study also compared the impact of the banner ads in this test to television and magazine norms from prior Millward Brown studies. The findings were remarkable: Single exposure to a Web banner generated greater awareness than a single exposure to a television or print ad. Rather, the effectiveness of Web advertising seems to stem from the fact that Web usage is an actively engaging exercise, similar to reading magazines.
　　While ad banners remain the predominant advertising vehicle on the Web ( accounting for approximately 54% of total online advertising revenues ), the increased use of content sponsorships (and interstitials, micro-sites, etc.) almost doubled during last year's second quarter, marking a shift towards more creative advertising on the Web.
　　Sponsorships of online content are much like event sponsorships: the hope is that users will more closely associate the content with the advertiser. If an advertiser has a strictly branding-awareness goal, sponsorships are an efficient way to achieve this marketing objective for a lower cost than traditional print.
　　Obviously, the type of advertising used is directly tied to the marketing objective. Banners have proven to be the most effective direct marketing tool, producing quantifiable units to which an advertiser can apply readable metrics and make real conclusions with real numbers about the effectiveness of their campaign.

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