Having your tea and drinking it, too - developing online product advertising programs

Brandweek, May 24, 1999 by Tim McHale

Tim McHale is media director of Blue Marble in New York, a digital marketing communications agency and division of the MacManus Group. He is reachable at (212) 474-5034 or tmchale@bluemarble.com.

"If you know time as well as I do, you wouldn't talk about wasting it," says the Mad Hatter to Alice in the midst of their Tea Party in the woods. Alice is finding her landscapes in Wonderland changing faster than Internet choices are changing for brand managers.

In previous Brandweek columns, ("Alice in www.land," March 8, April 19), we defined the marketplace in cyberspace and examined how ad servers and little spy devices called "cookies" are tracking consumer behavior for online database marketing. Looking now at the dazzling array of virtual ways to communicate, one finds even more parallels with Lewis Carroll's 1862 storybook. Just when contemporary advertisers were getting familiar with the basic tools like banners and buttons, a whole new world of online communication options has blossomed.

Real-time chat rooms and community site networks are giving millions of teens and collector/enthusiasts their first online "dialogues," and they love it.

Auctions are attracting millions of shoppers to the world's largest flea markets.

Much of the most popular music in scores of countries is being downloaded into homes through MP3.

Already half a million homes have added the broadband cable modem and now travel the Internet 50 times faster.

And the day is approaching when your refrigerator, linked through your computer to your neighborhood supermarket, will actually tell you (through voice technology) when you're running low on staples and will e-mail the store to start bagging and delivering.

Is Wonderland happening before our eyes and ears? The Net is not just a high-end handful of movie stars and early adopters pruning and trimming their personal Web sites the way suburbanites prune and trim their lawns. Practically overnight we have spawned a mass global market of "homesteaders," entrepreneurs and direct marketers, all chatting, pitching, gaming, trading, bidding, selling and partying online. It's a Mad Tea Party.

Marketers accustomed to juggling the big numbers of traditional offline media are planning serious investments in this multi-task medium that now reaches more than one-third of all U.S. households, includes almost 40% female surfers and boasts more than 2,000 radio stations. Traffic growth doubles every three months. As original programming converges with personal and paid messages, online focus groups and e-commerce revenue models are sprouting like wildflowers.

The industry is filled with pioneering lab scientists. Lots of these young media supplier companies, like Mplayer, Uproar.com or Unicast, are ready to build you creative and dynamic media packages at prices you can't afford to ignore. Media pricing is increasingly based on cost-per-click or cost-per-lead, or cost-per-transaction, or cost-per-acquisition. Sometimes cost is even figured through a counter-traditional "goal backwards" process to calculate media pricing based on how much a marketer thinks can be sold. Yet these new models are in reality as old as direct marketing, media planning and buying issues: how to choose what's most innovative, efficient and effective. The difference is it all goes down in an online universe in which no two media vehicles are alike.

Recall how Alice's encounter with the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Doormouse leaves her some-what awestruck and lost between seemingly similar sounding ideas. "You might as well say that 'I eat what I like' is the same as 'I like what I eat,' or 'I like what I get' is the same as 'I get what I like,"' prattles the Mad Hatter. In NBC's recent TV miniseries version of the classic, Martin Short is the oddest Hatter imaginable, with his head manipulated by computer onto what looks like a smaller animatronic body. He's wonderfully surreal, muttering lines like, "You've never spoken to time, have you? Well, I have." The party hosts go round and round and Alice, their polite guest, never gets a cup of tea she can drink.

By contrast, in www.land, you can during your daily click-journey have your tea and drink it, too. With the right online media partner, your messages can be as targeted and compelling as they are in the most specialized print vehicles and cable stations; moreso, in fact because virtual communication edges you closer to fulfilling each individual customer's real expectations. At Blue Marble, for example, we're doing special teen music deals on cutting edge sites like UBL, so young adults purchasing CDs can "zone out" with a free sample of Milky Way's new creamier caramel taste. On the corporate e-firm track, we're transforming the separation between editorial and ad sales with distributed content deals among a dozen top financial business-to-business sites for Ernst & Young, redefining the old church and state rules. We're also figuring exciting new ways to turn young upscale mountain bikers into contemporary buyers of Cadillac Cateras.