Interesting Twist to BANNER ADVERTISING

From: Fred <DTGNews_at_aol.com>
Date: Tue 28 Dec 1999 07:21:37 EST

Greetings listees...

You may remember my comments recently about a "Robot
that Clicks" on banner ads for you. Well, during that
development we've come upon another interesting bit of
coding genious that we just had to jump on right away.
I'm posting it here to see if anyone on this list
thinks it's interesting or worth the trouble to code.

For the past three years I've been saying the whole
advertising landscape on the web would change
dramatically. At some point people will become more
interested in local ads than remote ones.

I don't know about you, but the advertisers around here
are more interested in attracting customers who will
purchase something. The concept is to serve ads that
will appeal to shoppers on a LOCAL basis. After all, a
car buyer in Virginia is probably NOT going to buy a
car online from a seller in Texas.

Local advertisers can't buy ads on the big web sites,
and really don't want to rely on the hit-or-miss
structure of the various "blackmail" banner
advertising schemes.

So I said: "How about we come up with code that TRAPS
the banner ads on ANY web page being surfed by anyone
on our private (dial-up subscriber) WAN, and replace
it with an ad for a local business?" They liked the
idea, so they built the code.

For instance: say any of the 60,000 dial up customers
log on and surf to any site with BANNER EXCHANGE, VALUE
CLICK or other banners purveyors on the target page...
rather than seeing some ad for some web site they're
not interested in, they'll be greeted ads for business
right in their neighborhood. Local business they'd
rather support. (Think about how many you'd rack up
with Yahoo alone!)

The nice part about it is ALL of those banner views are
now logged to our ad demographic statistics as opposed
to someone elses... and suddenly the "views" increase
a thousand-fold, and the local advertisers get many
more exposures to customers more likely to come and
shop at their business! Sort of like "Think Globally
-- Act Locally".

So I told my head tech guy, "WHOA... what if the Post
Office captures every incoming issue of NEWSWEEK and
replaces all the ads with local ads before delivery to
the subscribers' mailboxes!"

Except it's actually better because there's no
down-time for the web page to go out and retrieve the
banner from the remote banner provider -- it's
instantaneous because all the banners are right here on
the server, and probably cached.

Now, we're wondering if this is the same thing as the
local cable operator who replaces network feed ads with
locally sold ads? Or the movie theater owner who sells
ads to air during the preview trailers of movies?
I've noticed attending the movies over the holidays,
more and more local advertising up on the big screen,
from Pepsi to the corner car wash.

What are your views on this?

Fred

The Graphic Design Network




Received on Tue Dec 28 1999 - 06:21:37 CST