Net Gains

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2000

However, the identification of site visitors is becoming a thorny issue. While the technology exists to capture a Web surfer's e-mail address without their knowledge, experts advise against it. For even though the practice may be legal (for now, at least), it raises a host of ethical and privacy concerns. Instead, Amoriello and others suggest creating incentives that will induce visitors to voluntarily provide their e-mail address.

"Maybe it's a scenario where a person can get access to premium content by providing some more information about themselves, or maybe they get to enter a contest; the point is that it needs to be voluntary," Amoriello says.

While that may take some additional effort, Amoriello says it can be well worth it, given the Web's potential: "Where people really want to go with this is to take the traditional data warehouse and have real time updates, instead of batch updates, so that their data is as current as the last transaction that took place. And this is what can happen on the Internet."

With that in mind, he says Automated Resources expects to roll out new technology in the first quarter of next year that will help make such scenarios easier to implement.

CONSUMER AFFAIRS

The idea of targeting customers while they are online is particularly compelling to large, consumer publishing houses, who face extraordinary costs when it comes to traditional direct mail campaigns. It's hardly surprising, therefore, that marketing executives at Time Warner's Time Inc. division are highly enthusiastic about their company's pending merger with Internet giant America Online.

Jeremy Koch, Time Inc.'s VP for consumer marketing, says his team is already thinking about ways in which they can leverage AOL'S ubiquitous online presence and massive customer base. "It's very exciting to us," says Koch. "AOL is a very direct-marketing driven company, and while integrating the databases isn't on the short list of what we can do in the next three months, long term there is huge potential in terms of putting the right offers in front of the right people at the right time by using e-mail and other electronic means."

It's a notion that rings true with Jay Callaway, business development leader for E-marketing Services at Acxiom Corporation in Conway, Arkansas. "We're trying to help our current customers in media and publishing take better advantage of the Internet," says Callaway, adding that, "They need to if their businesses are going to continue to grow." However, Callaway hastens to add that some publishers may need to partner with a knowledgeable service provider in order to take full advantage of the online world: "What magazine companies have today is a wealth of information about their existing customers. What Acxiom has is the ability to link that information together across their enterprise and make it usable. It's critical that you know who your customers are by connecting online information with offline information in your database."

Doing so offers a number of advantages, Callaway emphasizes. "You can better personalize the content and the messages that you are sending, which is much more effective than the shotgun approach," he says.