Advertising and the internet: the difficult convergence

Abstract

Advertising and the internet: the difficult convergence — Ever since the crisis of Fordism, competition between companies has led to an increasingly fierce quest to draw the consumer’s attention to advertisements, engendering what we call audience saturation resulting from the ubiquitousness of advertising. This saturation is aggravated as the rising costs of broadcasting in the mass media continually drive advertisers to seek new forms of addressing the consumer. In this context, it would be reasonable to expect the Internet to become a privileged route of access to the consumer. However, the Internet’s relevance in traditional advertising is still negligible, at least in Brazil. This article strives to demonstrate this phenomenon, analyzing some recurring opinions in the advertising sector and explaining it in the light of an understanding of a broader advertising dynamics, thus contributing to the debate on the consequences of the advent of the Internet for the communication system and for culture.