Re: What a long strange trip it's been
BOB MCLAUCHLAN WROTE:
> Several times I have read Rob Frankels diatribes about the
> "value" of Internet branding. For most companies trying very
> hard to make their models work effectively "Internet
> Branding" for branding sake is a very expensive,
> questionable and always upside down economically as an
> exercise. In fact, the only companies with pockets deep
> enough to afford "Online Branding" exercises are Fortune 500
> or highly financed companies with burn rates tolerated by
> investors in the name of a .com venture. In the words of
> Seth Godin, "Internet branding is an oxymoron"
>
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Bob's unnecessarily ad hominem comments notwithstanding,
it's pretty obvious to almost everyone that there's some
value beyond just click- thrus in banner advertising.
Leo Sheiner reported not too long ago on Safe-Audit's
in-house campaign with lousy clickthru rates that ?doubled?
his new member applications. (Wish I had kept that email)
Whether you call that "branding" or "awareness" or
"promotion" isn't of much concern to me.
It certainly appears almost everybody feels that prominent
display of a URL is a key part of most banner creative. If
that isn't intended to produce non-clickthru traffic then
it's a terrible waste of scarce space. In fact, several of
the banners I've been offered recently are essentially
nothing but a URL - and of course they're paying per click.
It would be nice to have some hard data about an isolated
campaign with a unique domain URL that was promoted only on
banners. But since most of us are using every avenue
available to drive traffic to our sites, it's not likely to
happen. So we'll have to use the admittedly less precise
and highly debatable analysis that we've often used for
other venues like radio and newspapers where consumer
actions are not always directly connectable to a specific ad
delivery.
Is it cost-effective? Depends on your business model and
what you have to pay for the banners. But I don't think you
can realistically contend that the clickthru results are the
only product of a banner campaign and calculate return on
those numbers alone.
Sanford Carr (spcarr_at_intermediacy.com)
Site Manager - Art and Craft Shows (dot) Net
Searchable database of US arts/crafts events
http://www.artandcraftshows.net/
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Received on Fri Apr 02 1999 - 08:56:15 CST
