Advertisements are the most powerful means for communicating the marketing message to the target audience. The presence of likeable attributes in ads has profound effect on the mindset of the audience and results in creating a positive image about the ads and consequently, the brands. This article focuses on understanding and using likeability in television commercials.

This paper examines the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and the gender digital divide in Africa by analyzing the situation in Ethiopia as a case study. The progress of the ICT in Africa is very slow when compared to Europe, North America and Asia. Ethiopia is characterized by poor telecommunication infrastructure and Internet access is confined only to cities. Therefore, one of the future challenges of the country is to expand ICT in the rural areas and tackle the gender digital divide.

A digital divide has many dimensions: the digital divide between developed and developing countries (Ogunsola and Okusage, 2006; and Steinmuller, 2001), the digital divide between men and women (gender digital divide) (Marcelle, 2000; and Huyer and Sikoska, 2003), the digital divide between urban and rural people (Chen and Wellman, 2003), the digital divide across racial groups (Fairlie, 2002) and the digital divide within a region (Caselli and Coleman, 2001; and Chinn and Fairlie, 2006). However, this paper concentrates only on one dimension of the digital divide: the gender digital divide. Right after the emergence of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) (particularly, the Internet), the digital divide has become a new research area for a considerable number of scholars including Adeya and Cogburn (2001), Norris (2001), Park (2001), Reddick and Boucher (2002) and Sehrt (2004).

According to Alzouma (2005, p. 353, citing Hall, 1998), citing Morino Institute (2004), it was Larry Irving, an ex-member of President Clinton's administration who coined the term the `digital divide' in the mid 1990s. However, Irving himself honestly admitted that the term was invented by two Los Angeles Times Journalists, Jonathan Webber and Amy Harmon, "to describe the Social division between those who were very involved in technology and those who were not" (Irving, 2001). The digital divide, in this case is "the inequality of access to computers and the internet" (Alzouma, 2005, p. 353, citing Hall, 1998). After analyzing the literature on the digital divide, Fink and Kenny (2003) claimed that the term `digital divide' has at least four interpretations: "a gap in access to use of ICTs; a gap in the ability to use ICTs; a gap in actual use; and a gap in the impact of use."

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