Proceedings of the Fifth China Summer Workshop on Information Management, June 25-26, 2011, Harbin, China 1 Perceived Affordances of Web Advertisements: Implications for Information Artifacts Design Jian Tang Yuxiang Zhao Ping Zhang Syracuse University Nanjing University Syracuse University jtang04@syr.edu yxzhao@smail.nju.edu.cn pzhang@syr.edu Abstract Perceived affordance is utilized as a theoretical lens to explore factors influencing consumers’ positive or negative perceptions of Web advertisements, which is one type of information artifacts. Content and form are two main attributes shared by information artifacts. Based on the literature review and content analysis, a conceptual framework is proposed to shed light on perceived affordance of information artifacts for the IS researchers and designers. Keywords: Information artifacts, Web ads, Perceived affordances, Design 1. Introduction The Internet has transformed consumers’ lives and how they experience information, work, entertainment, and brands. According to a recent report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), U.S. Internet advertising revenues hit $6.4 billion in the third quarter of 2010, representing the highest quarterly result ever for the online advertising industry and a 17% increase from the same period in 2009 (IAB 2010). Web advertisements or Web ads are those advertisements that are presented to the targeted consumers through the World Wide Web. With the increase of Web ads on the Internet, many researchers from various disciplines have been paying attention to the effectiveness of Web ads, i.e. how consumers react to Web ads and how Web ads affect consumers. Zhang and Kim (2008) conducted a qualitative meta-analysis to provide a comprehensive view of the state of empirical research on various factors that influence consumers’ reactions to Web ads and factors that influence Web ads’ impacts on consumers. The findings reflected that three kinds of interactions (View-Ad, View-Host, and View-Product/Service) play an important role in terms of the consumers’ perceptions towards Web ads. The Viewer-Ad interaction is about consumers’ reactions to the features or characteristics of Web ads. The Viewer-Host interaction represents consumers’ perceptions of the hosting entities (normally websites). The Viewer-Product/Service interaction concerns about consumers’ perceptions and attitudes to the products or services being advertised. The last two interactions may be more related with the marketers, policy makers, and managers who are behind the Web ads, while the Viewer-Ad interaction may attract more interest from the designer’s perspective. Design science is one of the most important research paradigms in Information Systems (IS) field (Henver et al. 2004. Previous studies investigate the design principles of IT artifacts from different angles (Ponte et al 2009; Hanseth and Lyytinen 2010; Tilson et al 2010). As a large portion of consumers don’t have direct interaction with the technical layer of the IT artifacts, and technologies are often transparent to those consumers, they may value more about the applications and information that are exposed to them. In that case, it is meaningful to explore the IT artifacts in a dualistic way, i.e. we divide the IT artifacts into the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’