Upgrading THE Online Ad Sale

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March 1, 2001 by Helen Berman

THE BIGGEST ADVERTISERS ON THE NET HAVE MOVED WAY BEYOND BANNER ADS. TO WOW CLIENTS TODAY, SALES REPS MUST MATCH MYRIAD ONLINE TOOLS WITH SPECIFIC MARKETING NEEDS.

Last year Jeff Kimmel spent a big chunk of his time trying to figure out exactly what it was he was selling. "I'd go to L.A. or San Francisco and our IT guys would bore me with technology scenarios," says the vice president of sales for Playboy.com. "A lot of the terminology and jargon and the models that were being built out there were foreign to me." Back on the East, coast Kimmel was leaving sales meetings even more confused. "I wouldn't be really sure what I accomplished or who I was selling who," he says. Everyone was looking for partnerships, so the end result was often a list of deals and exchanges, he says, but no sales.

Fast forward a year and Kimmel says he's much more in control of the online ad sales pitch. "Now I discuss sales and marketing and creativity and packaging." He matches marketing tools with client needs and wraps the technology around sales objectives.

But the majority of the media industry is a long way off from mastering the dynamics of the online medium. On both the sales and client side, confusion still reigns. "There's definitely a glut of information out there now on what your [sales] products can encompass," says John Flowers, an online business development manager at Watt Publishing. After all, says Flowers, "if I sit in front of you with six different advertising opportunities, it's difficult to focus on one or two that are right for your company."

Until sales staffs can sort it all out, few clients will be banging down the door to get a piece of a company's online ad offerings. But publishers who don't push their sales people to upgrade online sales skills risk losing a big piece of the ad dollar pie. According to a poll of 59 marketers by Forrester Research, each company surveyed plans to double its online ad spending to $1 million by 2003, which amounts to a projected $62 billion spent on Web marketing in 2005.

Where to start

First, understand that if technology can create it, publishers can sell it. Moreover, the same sales strategy that works in print sales works online: It's all about linking an advertiser's specific needs and objectives to a publisher's specific feature.

"Clearly, there are differences between the online and offline tools that advertisers use, says Karen Breen Vogel, senior vice president, strategies, for business-to-business network B2BWorks. "But the objectives are the same: Are you trying to introduce a brand, drive leads for a particular product or service, or get registration for an event? We want to match that objective to the best tool online."

To put together the right presentation for each online prospect, consider the following:

The Marketing Goal

Early in the Internet's history--meaning just two or three years ago--"the Internet was thought to be a great direct-response medium," says Kristine Shine, vice president of online advertising for Business Week Online. That was particularly true at the onset of Web advertising, when click-through rates for banners hovered around 8 percent.

Now click-through rates have dropped through the floor, averaging between 0.03 and 0.06 percent for banners on consumer sites, and perhaps twice that for banners on targeted b-to-b sites, according to various sources. Granted, attention-getting streaming and audio banners can still average 5 to 6 percent click-through rates, according to NetBreak, a company that creates such banners. But for most online advertisers today, "the click-through metrix is dead," says Charles Buchwalter, vice president of media research for AdRelevance, a Jupiter Media Metrix company, which advertisers can use for branding, lead generation and customer retention, as well as direct response.

"When I started in this business, all that advertisers wanted was eyeballs on the page," says Jennifer Easton, former marketing manager for OneMediaPlace, an online service for ad buying and selling. "People have gotten a lot more savvy about the system and the ad model."

Today, online marketing tools can fit any number of goals. Each banner size carries a different benefit: For introducing a new brand or product, standardsize, horizontal banners "help promote awareness or positioning or a featured benefit," says Buchwalter. Billboard banners, which don't click through to anything, provide constant brand exposure to established advertisers. Microbuttons provide one-word brand reinforcement or announce affiliation with a Web site. Large, vertical skyscraper banners enable highly detailed information about new products or offers. (See chart, page 64.)

With dozens of other tools available online, "we're only beginning to realize the role that online marketing plays in the whole advertising mix," says Buchwalter.

Audience Size

The size of an advertiser's customer base not only determines where to place an ad, but what kind of ad to place. It's the same rule in print: The broader the audience, the more likely that advertisers will want straight image branding. The more targeted the audience, the more likely it is that they'll want interaction and response.