NONE: ONLINE-ADS>> WEB-AD'98 COVERAGE: 2/3/98 - Report from the floor, #1
ONLINE-ADS>> WEB-AD'98 COVERAGE: 2/3/98 - Report from the floor, #1
richard_at_tenagra.com
Tue, 3 Feb 1998 07:29:01 -0600 (CST)
Web Advertising '98 Email Coverage
Report from the floor, #1
February 3, 1998
=====================================================================
This is the first in a series of 10 reports from Richard Hoy, who
is covering the Web Advertising '98 conference in New York this week.
You will receive these reports in addition to your normal Online Ads
posts/digests.
This coverage is archived at:
http://www.o-a.com/webad98/webad98-archive.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------
This conference coverage is generously underwritten by:
Match.com
Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match. Advertise on Match.Com and
we'll play matchmaker with your product and a half-million affluent
singles. Our subscribers are people that are open to new adventures
(like your site, for instance). They are people who are comfortable
with an online commerce environment. In fact 50,000 of them log on to
meet each other every day. That means better targetability for you. We
target your banner based on demographic data supplied to us by each of
our subscribers. That's how we deliver your ad to the individuals you
want to reach. That's how we can offer you exceptional reporting as
well. This Valentine's Day, Match.Com will be a leading online
destination for thousands of singles. We can make that true for your
site, too.
Try Match.Com now and we'll give you three months for the price of
two. To find out more, visit us at:
http://www.match.com/advertising/
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
The Web Advertising '98 conference was kicked-off yesterday with a keynote
from David Klein, associate publisher/editor of The Ad Age Group.
David gave us a history lesson on the trials and tribulations of radio
and television, which has an amazingly similar evolutionary paths as
the Internet. David took the audience through some very interesting
tidbits of information:
-- Before any commercial radio stations existed, hobbyists were using
them to talk to one another.
-- As soon as there was money to be made, large commercial companies
moved in to popularize the technology.
-- The original deal to control the radio business was the formation
of RCA by General Electric, AT&T and Westinghouse. General Electric
and Westinghouse built the receivers, AT&T set up the transmission
network. In 1929 AT&T decided to start building its own receivers,
citing the reason that they were "integrating" the receiver and
transmission system because the receiver was an integral part of the
transmission system. (Sound familiar?) General Electric and
Westinghouse went to the government to complain and the resulting
judgement was the creation of a subsidiary called NBC.
--In the beginning of radio, everyone thought the market was providing
equipment to people who wanted to broadcast. People would buy a 5 watt
transmitter and literally sit in their garages playing a piano or
talking. Finally, someone realized the radio provided a market for
creating and selling content.
-- In the early 1920s, when the first commercial radio station came
online, there was all sorts of investment in infrastructure with no
clear business model for recouping the investment.
-- Many people were upset that advertisements were chosen as a way to
fund the cost of developing radio content.
-- When television came on the scene, people were amazed but very few
bought one of their own until the content was sophisticated enough to
appeal to a mass audience.
--Procter and Gamble, one of the largest advertisers in the world, is
on record as expressing doubts about television's capabilities as an
advertising medium. Two years ago they said nearly the exact same
thing about the Internet.
David left the audience with three important issues than need to be
addressed in the coming years if the Internet is to continue its
growth. First, the issue needs to be resolved is advertisers spending
more on their own Web sites than on advertising. Second, some sort of
pay-per-view model will need to be worked out of the Internet because
advertising alone probably won't cut it for the majority of sites. And
finally, there is too much clutter and intrusiveness in current way we
do online advertising. We are at risk of alienating the audience if we
force them to watch too much advertising.
THE BEST OF THE BEST
Mara Lipacis and Bob Risse of the online publication Channel Seven
gave a rundown of the best banner/interstitial ad campaigns of 1997.
Some of the more interesting campaigns included one run for Honda that
combined an interstitial followed by a banner.
Another worthwhile mention is a campaign run for a company called
Tivoli. They used banner ads to drive people to a shockwave-based
game show hosted by Rocky and Bullwinkle. The game changed regularly,
so once people were driven to the site with banners they came back for
each new edition of the game.
Many of the ads profiled in the presentation can be found at:
http://www.iadcampaigns.com/iadcampaigns/index_iad_nojava.html
NUMBERS, NUMBERS EVERYWHERE
In his typical conservative and modest manner, Michael Tchong made
some sense out of the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, numbers
defining the online audience. I'm going to focus on this session in
some depth in a report following the conference, but here are some
highlights:
-- the growth rate of the Internet population is still phenomenal yet
today - roughly 1 new user every 1.8 seconds.
-- 44% of the online population is now female.
-- 55% percent of the online population is college educated. (Compared
to 20% of the American population.)
-- roughly a quarter of US households are online, and it occurred in 5
years.
-- about one in four purchase online
--repeat business is valuable. Of the people who shop online, repeat
customers spend about twice as much as new customers.
-- about 68% of the estimated 53 million people online are business
users.
-- a full 20% of business users are getting their news online.
Michael pointed out that this last statistic I cited is very worrisome
to publishers of traditional business news. It means that 20% of their
readership has already been lost to the Internet.
Look for a more detailed analysis of this session in the days
immediately following the conference.
HOW YOU ARE GETTING SCREWED
Brad Aronson of i-Frontier and Nick Givotovsky of Datasphere
Interactive ran down how much error there really is in our metrics for
online advertising. It turns out that to this day everyone still uses
different counting methodologies which lead to wildly different
numbers when measuring traffic.
Brad cited a rather interesting case that happened to BPA involving
spiders - the automated programs search engines use to catalog site.
BPA was doing a three-month audit on a site and discovered a huge
surge in traffic in month three. The reason was that someone just
happened to be repeatedly testing a new spider on this particular
site. Brad pointed out that BPA only noticed the spider because of the
irregularity in traffic. But what if the spider was hitting the site
all during BPA audit? They might have reported inflated numbers for
the traffic.
Brad described how you can use inconsistency in reporting to your
advantage. A major publisher that i-Frontier works with recently
change their counting methodology from every time the banner loads to
every time the page loads. This means impressions are being counted
even if a person has the graphics turned off. Brad used this as
leverage to get a lower CPM.
There were lots of great tips in this presentation. I think people
didn't give it high ranks in our voting because the title wasn't all
that exciting or descriptive. I've decided I'm going to do a detailed
session synopsis on this. What we'll do is compress the reports from
the floor into just four, and expand the detailed session synopses to
six. That way we can include all the great advice and still deliver
our total of 10 reports. So look for a more detailed analysis of this
session in the days immediately following the conference.
I'M SO SORRY
I just realized that through an oversight that was completely my
fault, I totally missed the session "What Gets Clicks: How to Make
Banners Deliver." That was one of the sessions you asked me to pay
particular attention to. However, I working on debriefing people that
were there, so look for in future reports.
This ends the first report from Web Advertising 98. Stay tuned for more
floor reports and detailed session synopses.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
This conference coverage is generously underwritten by:
Match.com
Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match. Advertise on Match.Com and
we'll play matchmaker with your product and a half-million affluent
singles. Our subscribers are people that are open to new adventures
(like your site, for instance). They are people who are comfortable
with an online commerce environment. In fact 50,000 of them log on to
meet each other every day. That means better targetability for you. We
target your banner based on demographic data supplied to us by each of
our subscribers. That's how we deliver your ad to the individuals you
want to reach. That's how we can offer you exceptional reporting as
well. This Valentine's Day, Match.Com will be a leading online
destination for thousands of singles. We can make that true for your
site, too.
Try Match.Com now and we'll give you three months for the price of
two. To find out more, visit us at:
http://www.match.com/advertising/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This is the first in a series of 10 reports from Richard Hoy, who
covered the Web Advertising '98 conference in New York. You will
receive these reports in addition to your normal Online Ads
posts/digests.
These reports are archived at:
http://www.o-a.com/webad98/webad98-archive.html
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