A recent McPheters & Company study seems to show that television and magazine ads are more effective than their online counterparts.

The study used 30-second TV ads, full-page 4-color magazine ads and standard-sized Internet banner ads. Groups of respondents spent 30 minutes with a single medium in a laboratory setting. They watched their choice of sit-coms, read a magazine they selected, or randomly surfed the Internet for 30 minutes. After the session, each filled out a survey about ad recall and eye-tracking software was also used for the Internet ads. McPheters took the results and calculated net recall for each medium. Here’s some of what they found:

• Net recall of TV ads was almost twice that of magazine ads
• Magazine ad recall was almost three times that of Internet banner ads
• Among web users, 63% of banner ads were not seen – respondents’ eyes passed over 37% of the Internet ads and stopped on slightly less than a third

Using these results and factoring in some other probability of exposure information, a full-page four-color magazine ad was determined to have 83% of the value of a 30 second TV commercial; a typical Internet banner ad has 16% of the value.