Abstract:

The emergence of internet had transferred consumer’s focus from traditional media (i.e.: newspaper, magazine, television) to new media (i.e.: internet). In Malaysia, around 59% of Malaysian are internet users and this phenomenon gives business people an opportunity to use internet as one of their marketing communication tools to promote their products and services. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau (2000), banner advertisement is used as a major online advertising tool. In addition, online consumer characteristics play an important role in designing banner advertisement in e-commerce environment.  Hence, the main objective our study is to identify the different types of online consumer characteristics such as: 1) consumer internal flexibility, 2) consumer involvement, 3) consumer perceived personal usefulness, 4) consumer attitude, and 5) consumer expectation. Besides that, we also investigated  how these variables influence web based banner advertisement among Malaysian Generation Y. Results of this study indicates that consumer internal flexibility, consumer attitude, consumer perceived personal usefulness, consumer involvement and expectation have significant positive relationship towards web based banner advertisement’s effectiveness.