Attention please: net advertisers battle for eyeballs - Internet advertising

Japan, Inc., Dec, 2002 by Bruce Rutledge

The average Japanese Web surfer spent more than 11 hours surfing the Internet from his or her home PC in August, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, which tracks worldwide Internet usage. But that same surfer clicked on advertising banners just twice per every 1,000 banners viewed--and there's no saying how many of those clicks were by mistake. Even advertisers will admit that banners just don't cut it in the baffle for eyeballs. So what's a corporation to do?

One strategy being used by more companies these days, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, is cross-media advertising. The company recently pointed to two successful campaigns run in Japan--one by food and drugmaker Meiji Seika and another by carmaker Mazda. Each company ran advertisements on TV and other media to draw traffic to special campaign pages on their Web sites. The results were impressive: Meiji, for one, received 630,000 visitors to its Web site in August from surfers on home PCs--well above the 81,000 visitors it drew in July. And an impressive 87 percent of those viewers viewed the campaign page, as opposed to just 17 percent who viewed the company's top page. In other words, people seemed to log on to the site after seeing ads in other media.

Mazda's campaign fared nearly as well: It drew 437,000 visitors using home PCs during August, compared with 141,000 visitors during the previous month. Nearly half the viewers viewed the company's campaign page.

But some companies have no need for big cross-media ad campaigns right now. Perhaps it's a sign of the times, but of the 10 advertisers home PC users saw most while surfing the Net in August, four were moneylenders and one was an employment agency.

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Average Internet Usage from Work PCs in Japan

                                     August          July     Change(%)

Number of Sessions per Month             47            52         -9.62
Number of Domains per Person             79            84         -5.95
Page Views per Month                  1,551         1,571         -1.27
Page Views Per Surfing
  Session                                33            30            10
Time Spent per Month               22:27:09      24:30:29         -8.39
Time Spent During-Surfing
  Session                             28:53         28:07          2.73
Duration of Page Viewed                0:53          0:56         -5.36
Average Monthly Banner Click
  Rate                                 0.10          0.13        -23.08
Internet Users                    8,385,538     8,208,088          2.16

Average Internet Usage from Home PCs in Japan

                                      August          July    Change(%)

Number of Sessions per Month              20            20            0
Number of Domains per preson              59            58         1.72
Page Views per Month                   1,181         1,099         7.46
Page Views per Surfing Session            59            55         7.27
Time Spent per Month                11:11:35      10:54:45         2.57
Time Spent During Surfing
  Session                              33:35         32:41         2.75
Duration of Page Viewed                 0:34          0:36        -5.56
Average Monthly Banner Click
  Rate                                  0.20          0.18        11.11
Internet Users                    26,196,199    25,172,390         4.07

Top 10 Advertisers (Banners Viewed by Those Using home PCs, in August)

       Advertiser            Unique Audience
                             (in thousands)

 1.    Yahoo!                    19,332
 2.    Amazon                    18,116
 3.    ORIX Credit               10,919
 4.    GE Consumer Credit         6,831
 4.    Mobir                     10,407
 6.    ORBIS                      5,860
 7     en-japan                   7,546
 8.    AIC                        7,413
 9.    At-Loan                    8,606
10.    avex network               5,641

Proportion of Visitors Viewing Specific Pages

www.meiji.co.jp (top page)              17%
cmp.meiji.co.jp (campaign page)         81%
www.mazda.co.jp                         36%
campaign.mazda.ca.jp (campaign page)    48%

Source for all graphs: Nielsen/ /NetRatings