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İNTERNET REKLAMCILIĞI GERİ GELDİ VE BU SEFER İYİ GELDİ

HAZİRAN 2002

The Online Advertising Comeback
By John Gaffney, June 2002 Issue

Volvo is typical of the new breed of online advertiser. "We now integrate the Internet into every campaign from day one," says Phil Bienert, Volvo's manager of e-business and product strategy. "We've found online ads encourage customers to deepen their relationships with Volvo. The data we can collect is invaluable." Under Bienert, Volvo has become one of the most innovative car companies online. It turned heads in the ad world when, faced with a downsized budget in late 2000, it decided to introduce its new S60 sedan exclusively through online ads -- a first for a car company. The six-month campaign ran on AOL and featured oversized video banners of the car driving a twisting road. It was a home run, delivering 30,000-plus sales leads to Volvo dealers and resulting in more than 500,000 e-mail newsletter sign-ups. Bienert has upped his Internet ad spending every quarter since and says online now totals 10 percent of Volvo's entire marketing budget.

As traditional marketers return to the Net, they're discovering that the landscape has changed dramatically since the go-go '90s. Not only do banner ads cost just a fraction of what they did then, but online publishers have unveiled nearly a dozen new attention-grabbing formats. Ads don't just wait patiently to be clicked on anymore; now they slither down pages, tilt screens sideways, pop up in windows, and blare full-screen music videos. (For a look at the new formats, their cost, and effectiveness, see "Way Beyond the Banner," page 120.) The familiar banner still tops most webpages, but newer, flashier formats are gaining ground. The percentage of standard banner and button placements has fallen from 92 percent in 2001 to just 84 percent in 2002, according to AdRelevance. Vertical banners, called skyscrapers, and large rectangles, which run in the middle of webpages, now account for 8 percent of online ads; the remaining 8 percent is composed of pop-ups, full-screen videos, and other new types.

Advertisers are finding these new formats more effective. Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca recently experimented with a new NYTimes.com model called surround sessions, which let companies target ads to select viewers the entire time they're on the site. Most drug spots barely make a dent in consumer recall; the campaign for AstraZeneca's Nexium heartburn medication, by contrast, raised brand awareness 20 percent, according to the company. "With advertisers skeptical of the Internet, the only way to grow revenues is to change the rules of the game," says Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of New York Times Digital. Nisenholtz credits surround sessions as well as other new online formats with helping to lift ad revenues 14 percent, year over year, to $10.2 million in the first quarter of 2002.

But not all consumers love the newfangled ads. "The first [full-screen] ad we ran for Budweiser took over the page, and people complained," admits Larry Kramer, CEO of San Francisco-based CBS Marketwatch (MKTW). Since then, "we've said no to ads that intrude too much on the page while you're reading. The trick is to understand what's engaging and what's intrusive."

Despite the backlash against certain online ads, even the most obnoxious, strobe-blinking, daughter-spawning pop-under superstitials aren't likely to drive away the more than 80 million Americans on the Net. Traditional marketers show no signs of bailing either. "The Internet has never seen more solid performance or had a more solid foundation than it does now," says R/GA's Greenberg, whose agency recently landed several new accounts, including Activision (ATVI), Bank One (ONE), and Nike (NKE). "All the big brands have taken a look at best practices over the past few years, and online advertising has made the cut.