By JIM STERNE
The free nature of the Internet makes advertising vitally important.
I’m from California. I believe that “information wants to be free.” I also believe that if wishes were horses, poor men would ride.
It costs a lot of money to gather information, to edit it and to publish it. Many Web sites have tried to charge subscription fees for access to the information they offer, and only a few have made a go of it. Surfers are too willing to go where the content is free because it is financially supported by advertising.
Gone are the days of the non-commercial Internet. Heck, gone are the days of non-commercial television. What do you call those 30- and 60-second spots that run just before “Masterpiece Theatre” on PBS? Public service announcements?
We say we don’t like ads. They cheapen art. “This Picasso brought to you by Nabisco” sounds like the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. But we tolerate ads because they subsidize the content we crave. They work for surfers looking for information and deals; they work for advertisers who want to get the word out. Internet advertising works.
Even if we profess to dislike ads, we still look for them. We want the information they supply. When I pick up a magazine on scuba diving, I’m interested in the articles, but I’m also interested in the ads. When my wife snags a copy of Vogue, she’s reading about fashion and seeing it in the ads. When I read the Santa Barbara News Press, I’m learning about the events of the day and the sales of the day. Ads are content.
On the Web, I look for scuba sites through Yahoo. In the section called Recreation: Outdoors: Scuba, there is a banner for a sale on wetsuits.
Having passed my 40th birthday a few years back, the wetsuit I purchased as a youth of 32 no longer fits on the best of days. I click through to the scuba site of my choice and see another wetsuit sale in progress, and I find that of interest as well. Those banners are content.
There are some (pick a number between 30 million and 75 million) people on the World Wide Web. Can I advertise to all of them? No. Can I put up a billboard on the Information Superhighway in hopes that all surfers will drive by? No.
Can I put up a banner on Yahoo that will be seen by 6 million or 7 million people a day? Yes. Can I generate awareness, build brand recognition and make people feel better toward my company, products and services? Studies say yes.
Despite the number of possible viewers, the magic of the Internet is not the quantity of people who will see your ad, but the quality of the audience you can reach. If you want quantity, spend $43,000 per second for time on the Super Bowl, or the last episode of “Seinfeld.” If you want to attract the attention of a specific group of people, narrowcasting is your answer.
If you want to sell your blood gas analyzer to chemotherapists, TV is going to be a tough place to reach them, but you will find them at www.medec.com. That’s where the folks who publish the “Physician’s Desk Reference” offer online interactive access to a compendium of drugs and their interactions. Those are doctors’ eyeballs on that screen and they are exactly the right people to whom to send your message.
What’s that? You want to sell to the general public? That’s just fine.
There’s a company in San Diego called Aptex that performs rocket-science calculations on your audience’s clicking habits with software they call SelectCast. It determines what your audience likes, and what ads they are likely to click on.
The process begins with DoubleClick, one of the world’s largest Web banner ad networks. DoubleClick serves banner ads from its clients onto some 200 Web sites in its network, including the Alta Vista search engine. When you perform a search, Alta Vista provides the results page and DoubleClick provides the banner. If you click on that banner or enter a search term, SelectCast takes note.
The resulting experience on identical Web sites, with and without SelectCast, is that the one with SelectCast has better ads, and therefore better content. The advertiser benefits by effectively marketing its products and services to a targeted audience, and the viewer benefits from ad banners tailored to his or her specific needs, which enhance the experience and enrich the content on the Web site.
Invasion of privacy? Hardly. Again, the system doesn’t know who you are, only what you like. Diabolical Big Brotherism? Get over it. It’s a service!
Jim Sterne, author of three books on Internet marketing, provides marketing and customer service strategy consulting to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurs. He can be reached at [email protected]
Entrepreneur’s Notebook is a regular column contributed by EC2, The Annenberg Incubator Project, a center for multimedia and electronic communications at the University of Southern California. Contact Dan Rabinovitch at (213) 743-2344 with feedback and topic suggestions.
