International Marketing Review,
Vol. 14 No. 5, 1997, pp. 362-375.

Mary Ellen Gordon and Kathryn De Lima-Turner.

This study is an early look at consumer attitudes towards internet advertising through the lens of social contracts.  It draws off of previous works which utilize a social contract framework in analyzing direct mail marketing, to impose a similar framework over internet advertising.  In this implicit contract, consumers give attention, private information, and other useful commodities to advertisers in exchange for internet content and access.  Within this framework, Gordon and De Lima-Turner examine specifically the trade-offs consumers make among advertising attributes, such as ad placement, message, and their own level of control.  The authors conducted an internet survey to examine which of five attributes--who controls access to ads, placement, message, influence on fees, and how private information is collected--are most important to consumers.

While this survey may seem rather limited in relevance to the topic of current consumer attitudes toward internet advertising because it was not published recently and because the sample of consumers was skewed (overly educated and overly male), the main findings have been borne out by history and other studies.  Somewhat surprisingly to the authors, they found that internet consumers are considerably lazier than expected.  When summarizing their results, they say, "The majority of Internet users, at least in our sample, seem to take quite a passive approach to the tradeoffs within the social contract. It is as though they view advertising as a fact of life. They hope it is as entertaining and as well targeted as possible, but they certainly do not want to exert any effort in ensuring this."  These findings concur with later studies which describe consumers' low attention to and lack of engagement with internet ads.  The authors were also surprised to find that consumers were comfortable with their usage being monitored for the sake of advertising.  This could be supported by the popularity of Google, Gmail, and other similar services which provide targeted ads in exchange for personal information.

Beyond providing findings about what influences attitudes toward advertising, the article also provide a framework for understanding why factors in this study and others matter.  Environments in which ttitudes toward advertising are positive, or at least neutral, could be examples of successful social contracts between advertisers and consumers, while situations in which consumers feel negatively toward advertisements could be the result of social contracts still being negotiated or contracts which once were accepted but have failed as changes occurred.