Anything goes in online advertising

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, August 1, 1996 by Thom Forbes

A media executive in charge of creating a Web site surveyed the state of online advertising and e-mailed an astute rhetorical question: "I've pulled together rate information on other sites," she wrote, "but without a complete demo and traffic picture, it's hard to do much more than establish the trajectory of the spaghetti as you fling it at the wall, right?"

Right. The Web may be boiling, but it's much too early to see what will stick. Links are begged, borrowed, traded, bartered, given away and sold at widely divergent rates. Competing programs track user activity at a site, to one degree or another, and provide reports that are useful, to some extent or another. Some sites perform real-time tracking of each user's preferences, and purport to make commercial offerings according to what his or her predilections seem to be. But I've yet to hear a publishing or agency executive exclaim: "Eureka! This is the future of advertising in cyberspace!"

The most heated debate is whether advertisers should pay for the number of eyeballs that are exposed to a banner advertisement on a Web page, or for the number of users who click on the ad's hotlink for more information.

Publishers roared when marketing mega-lith Procter A Gamble suggested that click-throughs should be the measure of a banner's worth. "We have no control over the creative," publishers protested, "or over how often the ad is refreshed."

Those are valid, but irrelevant, points. Plenty of sites will accept clickthroughs, or similar ways of judging users, involvement with an online "ad" (such as sales), as a standard. Not necessarily because P&G is so mighty, or because new media demands new thinking, but because it will be to their own advantage.

Large sites with lots of traffic undoubtedly should agitate for an eyeballs' measurement system. Call it The CPM Way of Life. If you're a behemoth, wave your traffic reports high, and stand firm.

But if you're publishing a smaller magazine within a niche, you should be selling your Web users the same way that you sell your readers - as highly motivated, qualified buyers with whom you have an intimate relationship. And you can prove it.

Among the clients of Saatchi & Saatchi Business Communications is a company that makes flooring fibers. Caroline Riby, vice president/media director at Saatchi in Rochester, New York, reasoned that nobody uses a Web search engine to find flooring fibers, but that plenty of qualified professionals - architects, budders and designers - surf for interior-design solutions.

Where might they go? To brand names they know - magazines such as Interiors and Sources and Metropolis, and Facilities-Net, a fee-based interactive information service that also contains two trades. So that's where Saatchi placed banners.

The new standard: Expediency

Smart publications work with advertisers, Riby says, to engage readers in ways that

them closer to advertised products than a link does. She suggests creating sponsored discussions with specialists.

"This is where we all have to be partners," she says. "The more publications understand how you sell your product, the more they can come up with creative ways of providing more than just a hyperlink to a site." Try contests or online events, perhaps creating features around product categories or answering users' questions as "The Interactive Gear Guy" does from within the Outside Online Outside Store.

On the Web, though, your competitors aren't just other print publishers. Saatchi also places links for its carpet-fiber client at the Web sites of trade associations and professional organizations. Advertisers themselves are creating content. The @Toyota site, for example, contains several Webzines targeted to the demographic ideals for different Toyota models. It's not co-opting outside advertisers at present - just users, eyeball-but what's to stop it?

Earlier this year, a representative from Time Warner's Pathfinder site pitched Martin Interactive, whose clients include Coca-Cola and Marriott. The rep talked about all the traffic the site generates and suggested that Marriott should run banner ads to redirect it.

But agency president Matt Thornhill was in a selling mood himself. The agency had constructed a value-added package of links for business travelers to bring a lot of visitors to the Marriott pages, Thornhill recalls. "We have about 80,000 people in our hotels every night, and it's easy for us to tell them what's going on at our Web site," he says. So Thornhill suggested that Pathfinder advertise on Marriott's site instead. No sale. Yet.

The fact is, not only is the spaghetti too raw to stick, all the steam from the pot makes it impossible to see the wall itself.