TOOLS : Take No Prisoners

AdMedia, Mar 1, 2007 by Simon Hendery

So what about this Internet thing? Seems to be an increasingly popular place to run ads ... ignore it at your peril and all that.

The Online Publishers Group has reinvented itself as the much- sexier sounding Interactive Advertising Bureau at a time when online adspend is rocketing towards the eight-figure stratosphere.

The IAB put on its serious face to talk about how it's leading the charge towards a more comprehensive analysis of online spend, which in turn will lead to better benchmarking around websites' marketshare, et cetera, all making online a more serious proposition.

Online took just a couple of years to leapfrog cinema in terms of adspend and today, with some estimates placing online spend at $80 million, it's snapping at the heels of outdoor and letterbox.

If current growth rates continue, online will even surpass radio and magazines within a couple of years. (Newspapers and TV should be safe in the top spots for a while longer, although given the speed at which TVNZ seems to be imploding, who knows?)

Meanwhile, you might have noticed the whole web environment has got more user-friendly and useful lately. The geeks call this transition Web 2.0 and it's been mirrored by a sophistication in online ads, which seem to be less intrusive, more creative and better targeted.

I actually look forward, for example, to the late-afternoon video ads that pop up on certain sites telling you what's going to be on TV3 news that night - clever use of technology, that.

NBR owner Barry Colman, who built up his classified publishing empire and flicked it on to ACP for squillions before online clas- ads got really big, bitched to me recently about how websites were a magazine publisher's financial curse.

His staff had bullied him into keeping the NBR website running, he said, even though he doubted it would ever turn much of a profit. It was a service readers demanded, even if they weren't prepared to pay for it.

Barry is right - you need more content than the NBR site can generate to seriously attract ad revenue.

The real action around online ads is confined to the mega-sites like Trade Me, NZ Herald and Stuff which have the pulling power to draw enough eyes to interest media buyers.

In that regard the new cyberspace turf war that began on March 1 will be interesting to watch. Former bedfellows Xtra (Telecom) and MSN (Microsoft) have gone their separate ways with Xtra now bunking down with Yahoo! while MSN teams up with ACP, TV3, Seek, Sportal and Australia's NineMSN.

The way MSN's PR team ambushed Yahoo!Xtra's launch party with their own announcement the day before both sites went live suggests the online medium is experiencing a new level of aggressive take-no- prisoners business development.

Radio and mags better watch out.