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Given that value exchange in virtually every sector of the economy is increasingly dominated by software, the goals of this chapter are to bring software to the attention of the academic marketing community, to discuss the unusual product attributes of software, and to therefore suggest some research topics related to software as a product attribute. Software allows service to be physically stored and allows physical objects to perform services. Managing products that have evolved into software products creates difficult challenges for managers as software does not resemble either tangible goods or intangible services in terms of production, operations, cost structure, or prescribed strategy. Every time a business replaces an employee with an e-service interaction, and every time a business adds a line of code to a previously inert object, the nature of that business changes. And as software gets more capable, its nature as a product changes as well by adding unique product characteristics summarized as complexity, intelligence, autonomy, and agency.

Very low click-through rates (CTR) raise serious questions about the effectiveness of banner advertisements. However, we believe that the effect of a banner ad is not limited by clicks. Banner ad information itself can be processed by the audience.

We propose that the exposure effect of a banner ad exists even when the banner is not clicked. The results of our experiments strongly support this effect. Analyses also revealed that a non-clicked banner ad can create as strong of an exposure effect as clicked banner ads. Also, audiences that are able to recall the existence of the banner ad on a web page develop stronger implicit memory than those who cannot. Researchers are invited to re-test these interesting findings in various cultures with differing levels of Internet penetration and experience.