Branding – UtilitesDB

Shine a Light

It’s been seven years since interactive agency Razorfish embarrassed itself on national television. When reporter Mike Wallace of CBS’ "60 Minutes" asked the agency’s co-founders what the company does, the answer was none too clear.

Jeff Dachis, co-founder of Razorfish, said to Wallace, "We’ve asked our clients to recontextualize their business." Asked for clarification, he added, "We’ve recontextualized what it is to be a services business." Wallace didn’t understand the answer. "We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them," Dachis explained.

Even though Dachis couldn’t seem to come up with an answer to satisfy Wallace, earlier in the program Dachis said of interactive agencies: "This is absolutely real; this is a revolution; we’re packing rifles; and this is going to be something that’s going to change the course of the way the world is functioning."

On that point he seemed to be right.

Razorfish, now known as Avenue A/Razorfish, owned by aQuantive, survived the ensuing dot-com crash and is currently ranked among the top 10 interactive agencies. Avenue A/Razorfish has even flourished, counting a roster of clients that includes Best Buy, Coors, Starwood, Wal-Mart and Weight Watchers. The company has reinvented itself from a Web design firm into a metrics- and response-focused house.

The majority of the top 10 interactive agencies in the U.S. have taken that mantra to heart, spinning out digital firms from their more traditional agency parents and combining Web design with a myriad of client services and metrics-based programs.

While this focus on the end-to-end as well as the most creative solution has indeed changed the way the digital agency functions, there are still lingering questions about who all this change is good for. The two tiers of interactive agencies – the digital arms spun out of traditional Madison Avenue powerhouses and the independent firms that got purely into digital about 10 years ago – are doing fairly well. Still, one faction points to the other a slacking in the forward-thinking bright ideas that will increase innovation and profits in the next phase of Internet advertising, mainly the social Web and search.

"Marketing on the whole still favors the traditional agencies," said Mark Kingdon, CEO of independent agency Organic. "But interactive is coming into its own. How do we work together, is the question." Organic emerged in 1993 as one of the first digital agencies and weathered the dot-com crash to thrive as an agency that specializes in deep customer profiling.

Big vs. Boutique

Organic may call itself an independent, but it is actually owned by giant Omnicom Group, which also owns Agency.com, Tribal DDB and Tequila in the interactive field. WPP owns Grey’s digital marketing arm and Ogilvy Interactive. Interpublic owns MRM Worldwide, R/GA and DraftFCB. The top 10 digital firms earn between $92 million and $235 million annually, according to AdAge. Avenue A/Razorfish leads the interactive pack with revenue of about $235 million in 2006. Omnicom is currently the holding company with the most revenue from its advertising units- about $11.4 billion worldwide in 2006. That’s about $6.2 billion in the U.S. It has also done well on Wall Street. In February of this year, its stock hit $106.90 per share, about 50 cents short of its all-time high in December of 1999.

While Organic is considered a smaller player, with revenue of about $102 million in 2006, Kingdon says that "marketing is under enormous pressure right now." He says that "people want to create a war between traditional and interactive agencies. "War may be a strong word, but the perception is that while independent digital agencies get all the "fun" work, bigger houses spun out of the traditional agency environments are still coming to terms with how to handle search marketing and the impact of social media. Spun-out digital agencies say they are best equipped to scale and meet all the client’s needs, be they digital or older media.

"Traditional agencies started to niche themselves," says Rohit Bhargava, vice president, interactive marketing at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. "They broke themselves into search and email marketing, etc. Now you have social media agencies. But the traditional agency is in real trouble now. With word of mouth, search and social media all coming from interactive agencies, traditional agencies don’t do that well, yet. "

Interactive agencies that came from the ranks of traditional agencies haven’t been hurting. DraftFCB, for example, earns about $95 million a year, and is the fairly recent marriage of FCBi and Draft Digital. FCBi was an outgrowth of traditional agency Foote, Cone & Belding. DraftFCB’s mantra is to stay response-driven but with the added value of more and better data. "In the past decade, the terrain went from silly money to accountability," says Brad Kay, executive vice president, executive director, digital, at DraftFCB. He says that the team has become younger and younger to help stay on top of innovation in thought and technology. The shop also has an elaborate intranet where employees can post "cool" stuff they encounter on the Web. This helps the "stay fresh or die" attitude, Kay says.

The small boutique shops may get a lot of adventurous creative work, but that’s how it was in the purely traditional agency universe in the days before digital. The two-man firms always got the regional business where your ad could feature grandmas in tattoos or precocious babies driving Harleys. "Sure," Kay adds, "some business goes to the boutiques and we’ll just have to get used to it." He says to help win new business they need to take on more people – something they do to stay abreast of innovation and the "hip factor."

The benefit to bigger traditional agencies is their deep pockets. To build a digital house from scratch seems to be a thing of the past. Buying a digital firm is easier. WPP Group has put Schematic, 24/7 RealMedia and Blast Radius in its corral. Publicis back in January doled out $1.3 billion for Digitas and also bought Web agency Business Interactif to bolster its presence in France, Japan and China. Omnicom, as mentioned, owns Agency.com, Tribal DDB and Organic, and continues to grow existing digital assets by taking a 50 percent stake in EVB, based in San Francisco.

Even among some of the independent shops, there is consolidation of the players. The big advertising parent companies now own a mix of big and small digital firms. Omnicom, Interpublic and Publicis, to name a few, own big earners who began as offshoots of traditional agencies and smaller companies that started as two guys with a little Web coding experience. "You don’t need to streamline everything across an agency anymore," says Ogilvy’s Bhargava. "We’re going to use JWT for billing and Ogilvy for PR because it is the same parent company."

Trevor Kaufman, CEO of Schematic, has said that in a case where Schematic is bought by WPP, the intent is to "help change the DNA of the operating company and make them inherently more digital." He says in the case of his company, "it’s a way of leveraging specialized skills over the entire network. It has been successful because, in the end, it is providing better, more integrated solutions for clients."

The CMO Factor

Chief marketing officers may need some convincing. A recent study done by Sapient said that more than 50 percent of chief marketing officers believe that the traditional, large advertising agency is not prepared to meet their online marketing needs. It said that one in 10 CMOs expected to align with traditional agencies for their online marketing, stating that traditional advertising firms have a hard time thinking beyond traditional print and TV media models.

A report by Forrester done in February 2007 said that "agencies struggle to help clients capitalize on emerging channels and technologies. In the meantime, marketers are diffusing agency power by turning to a portfolio of players in search of specialized expertise. As marketers select new agency partners, they must revise their evaluation criteria to build an integrated marketing team."

And a March 2007 study by the Chief Marketing Officer Council said that 54 percent of marketers surveyed stated they plan to quit one of their agencies this year. The study summed up by saying that "marketing is undergoing substantial changes due to a mandate for CMOs to improve the relevance, accountability and performance of their organizations."

A brand may know what they want but have a hard time finding it. "Most interactive agencies have a hard time getting human resources together," offers Robert Tochterman, interactive brand manager for Ralston Purina. "Some agencies don’t know who’s going to be on an account until the work begins. You’re really buying into the confidence of the people at a director level." Tochterman looks for a team that "has rigorous methods for measuring the impact of a campaign, keeping an eye on return on investment. That’s the kind of discipline we’re looking for. Most agencies don’t talk about that. It’s comforting when they do."

Getting in the Network Game

Some big agencies are attempting to streamline their synergy by creating their own networks. The Omnicom Group, for example, announced it is erecting a "digital creative network" to be called Redurban. The aim is to globalize marketing and creative in an Amsterdam-headquartered endeavor out of recently acquired Redurban agency of the Netherlands. Euro RSCG, owned by Havas, also recently announced that its 4D digital arm would be moving into its New York office, with "integration" as its intent. Publicis, headquartered in France, has taken three of its agencies to create what it calls a "central services operation" named The InsightFactory. Leo Burnett, Starcom MediaVest Group and Digitas will contribute labor and technology to The Insight Factory, making a full-service mix of their media, digital and creative services.

This news comes after Omnicom’s push to integrate TBWA/Worldwide agency and Agency.com failed. TBWA was put in charge of Agency.com in 2005 and they just never made it work, according to news reports. In addition, Agency.com’s Dallas office announced it would close down completely, putting half of its small staff on the streets. Agency.com founder Chan Suh returned to the company in April as chief executive after CEO David Eastman held the top spot for less than a year.

Organic CEO Kingdon still maintains that there are some things the bigger digital companies can’t do that they do – what he calls a "client contact strategy." He says the client wants to know not the "what" of defining the traditional brand but the "how" of the digital approach. "Interactive agencies can handle the pace of innovation," he says, "but digital is always changing, so pure digital agencies know no differently. They were there when HTML first came along and when there was no money and they learned to thrive through Flash and Ajax and all that."

A case in point is the vanishing campaign microsite – websites built around a specific product. When Coca-Cola recently launched a new character for its Sprite drink, it did not launch a microsite, but set up the character on Facebook, complete with videos, music and discussion pages on the profile. Microsites are now seen as the "old model," shifting instead to where younger audiences gather – Facebook, MySpace, widgets and mobile applications. Adam Lavelle, chief strategy officer at iCrossing, points out that campaign sites tied to short-term promotions or products consistently rank low on search engines. "I don’t understand how, long term, a site builds brand equity," he says, "and with search, I don’t see that having long-term visibility."

The quandary for some brands, then, is do they sign up with a hot new interactive agency or do they stick with their shop of record? Ogilvy’s Bhargava believes the "top 10 are taking low-hanging fruit," with the bigger clients getting "a lot of follow-on business from other unit business. It is not cold calling. It is qualified leads." Lavelle says there is no monopoly on the best ideas, a sentiment that seems clear from the success of some independent interactive agencies. He says the "most important thing for marketers to think about is, ‘as I move more money from traditional into digital, does this agency have the capabilities that I want? Are there types of activities online, in mobile devices or other things I could be doing?’"

"You’re in trouble if you’re just building websites," says Bhargava. "We don’t want any one type of thinker," adds DraftFCB’s Kay. "The channel changes on a minute-by-minute basis. "We want to compete with the pure-play and the behemoth."

And Razorfish’s Dachis? Has he recovered from his embarrassment on national TV? After the dot-com crash nearly killed Razorfish, he left the company and formed Bond Art and Science, a consultancy that he says is not in the ad business even though reports seem to indicate it covers at least some of the same ground as Razorfish. Evan Orensten, a partner at Bond, says the company does "experience design," which sounds like an interactive agency.

Taking It Offline

If baseball is the thinking person’s game, then online advertising is the thinking person’s medium. Much like the national pastime, part of the draw of online advertising comes from the ability to break down performance into limitless particles of useful (and useless) information, such as batting average with runners in scoring position after the 7th inning, or the clickthrough rate differential for an ad run at 8 a.m. versus 8 p.m.

But just as it is impossible to figure out why combining the best players won’t make for the best team (just ask George Steinbrenner), determining the most effective roles that online and off-line marketing should play to produce the best possible results remains largely a mystery. Online advertising revenue continues to close the gap with off-line spending, resulting in heightened interest in wanting to figure out how best to integrate performance marketing with off-line campaigns.

Integration Issues

During the first half of 2006, online advertising revenue grew by 37 percent over the prior year according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, and the dawn of video ads will likely further accelerate growth. Advertisers flocked online because they could get more precise data about ad effectiveness than through broadcast or print.

“Before, everyone had to take [ad effectiveness] on faith,” says Mark Williams, a founding partner of San Francisco interactive agency Mortar. But after seeing the low (1 to 2 percent) clickthrough rates, some advertisers ask about putting more resources into off-line, which he views as a mistake.

Focusing only on clicks as a performance metric doesn’t tell the whole story, according to Williams, who says that as with off-line campaigns, assessing online performance should consider factors such as brand awareness and the ability to generate word of mouth. “CPM blindness” as Williams calls it, is when advertisers get lost inside the numbers of what is known about certain aspects of a campaign instead of looking at the overall picture. Many people who saw an online ad will eventually go into a store and make a purchase, and the advertiser will never be able to connect the dots, according to Williams.

One method for tying off-line to online campaigns is to promote custom URLs in print or through broadcast and track the number of responses. Advertisers have adapted the longstanding practice from newspapers that printed unique phone numbers to track leads.

Marketing services company Who’s Calling, of Kirkland, Wash., develops custom landing pages that can be promoted on-or off-line to track individual behaviors, according to CEO Stuart DePina. Newspaper or TV ads include links to pages that contain unique phone numbers, enabling the original media source to be identified.

DePina says client Chrysler sent out direct mail that included a link to custom landing pages for different vehicles, so that when online shoppers called the listed phone number, the agent answering would know in which vehicle they had interest.

Tracking customers through unique pages “helps to build demographic information from the start,” DePina says, resulting in a greater likelihood of moving the buying process further upstream.

Michael Stalbaum, CEO of marketing services company UnREAL Marketing, says promoting websites off-line can become even more effective when combined with search engine marketing. His client Synova Healthcare was running radio ads to promote an online coupon for a menopause test kit without much success, which Stalbaum attributes to the inability of people to write down a website address while driving.

After buying keywords related to menopause testing, the number of coupons downloaded per week more than tripled, according to Stalbaum. By integrating campaigns, Stalbaum says you may not reach more people, but touching them multiple times can increase the results.

Advertisers whose off-line campaigns are limited to promoting custom URLs can be disappointed, according to Mortar’s Williams. If an advertiser gets a low response rate, it “creates the opposite of what you want because it gives the impression that it doesn’t work,” so Williams recommends against the practice.

While being able to quantify the interaction of off-line and online may be difficult, Williams says every campaign – whether for a brick-and-mortar or online-only seller – should include online and off-line components to maximize its effectiveness. “Online brands that take themselves seriously have to go off-line,” he says. For example, Travelocity and Yahoo recently launched integrated campaigns with multi-million-dollar buys in print and television.

Translating Word Of Mouth

Off-line campaigns that emphasize branding can have a snowball effect when used in conjunction with affiliate programs and search engine marketing, according to Ed Weisberg, vice president of e-commerce for Pingo, a company that sells prepaid calling cards online. Weisberg says the company has been buying banners ads and keywords on search engines as well as working with affiliates for two years.

This summer the company decided to advertise on billboards and in subways in cities where there is a heavy concentration of its target customers – those who make many long distance phone calls. The hope was to expand the audience by getting people in the communities with large Indian and Chinese populations to talk about the calling card savings since “not everyone uses search engines,” Weisberg says. Pingo representatives also attended ethnic festivals such as parades and carnivals and handed out promotional materials to reinforce branding. The company saw a surge in orders coming from the cities where the company was advertising off-line.

Weisberg coordinated the effort with affiliate managers, allowing them to put their own branding on the cards, and to develop call-to-action strategies where searches based on the word-of-mouth campaign could turn into special offers such as coupons. The off-line advertising also attracted new affiliates, according to Weisberg.

“If we have someone to reach, we’ll be less successful in reaching them if we only advertise in one place,” Dave Evans, co-founder of social media company Digital Voodoo, says. Evans claims an effective method of leveraging consumer buzz is to provide information that stimulates interest online and then use offline marketing to encourage people to do word-of-mouth marketing through their online and off-line social networks.

According to Evans, online advertising can respond quickly to negative press or word of mouth. If bloggers take a company to task, their message can rapidly become widespread, so online advertising is a better method of reacting more quickly than off-line.

While off-line campaigns can help build awareness, online advertising can be more effective in prompting sales because they reach people at the time when they are looking to buy, according to Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore Networks. “In the off-line world it is difficult to put an ad in [search] context,” says Fulgoni, whose company measures advertising and media performance. The exceptions are advertisements in print directories such as the Yellow Pages, he says.

Because there is not a reliable method to track the effectiveness of off-line campaigns of an entire population, comScore works with a panel of representative households and tracks their online behavior, Fulgoni says. Software that tracks online journeys is installed on the panel’s computers. The company measures how many people search for and buy particular products before and after a television or print ad runs in their area. Panel members are also surveyed about their subsequent off-line purchases as well, according to Fulgoni.

The effectiveness of television advertising can be greatly enhanced by reinforcing the message through online video advertising, Fulgoni says. “Video [ads] will make things really move in search,” he says, adding that the company is developing metrics for tracking video ad performance.

To reach audiences who spend a lot of time online, video ads are becoming a substitute for TV campaigns, according to Fulgoni. “Once you have sight, sound and motion [in online ads]” advertisers may not need to run television campaigns, he says.

An integrated campaign for the 2007 Dodge Nitro SUV demonstrated the effectiveness of using video on multiple platforms. Dodge geared the car ad toward male buyers and shot a series of video spots that would be used on broadcast and satellite TV and online, according to Mark Spencer, a senior marketing manager at Dodge. To reach the 30- something male demographic that spends many hours per week online, “we needed multiple screens, not just TV,” Spencer says.

The campaign was first introduced online. Dodge built on the experience from a previous campaign for the Caliber by increasing the number of videos online so that the experience online was similar to the television spots, says Spencer. When Dodge ran Nitro ads during the World Series that directed viewers to the website, traffic increased by 40 percent, according to Spencer.

The same creatives were used off-line and online to generate word-of-mouth buzz, says Spencer. “Our strategy was to be consistent … so that enough people will talk about [the car],” he says.

The TV campaign, which ran for 90 days, included spots run during programming that skews to younger males, including the NFL, NASCAR, and NBC’s “Law and Order”. Print ads that promoted the website ran in publications geared toward African-Americans and Hispanic audiences, Spencer says. Dodge’s integrated strategy also includes promoting the Nitro through the NHL 2K7 video game, according to Spencer.

The online campaign, which represented 20 percent of the total advertising dollars, included pre-roll and click-to-play videos on MSN, YouTube and The Onion. To move potential customers from the website upstream into the buying process, Dodge introduced click-to-talk and click-to-chat features that include the ability to pass customers from Dodge representatives to local dealers, Spencer says. (The campaign was only a few weeks old at the time of publication, so results were unavailable.)

Measuring Clicks To Sales

Just as it is impossible to accurately determine the number of online purchases that were initiated in response to someone seeing a billboard ad or radio spot, the ability to track the offline purchases of those who see online ads effectively ends when people step away from the keyboard.

While it is common for retailers to ask buyers where they first heard about the company or product at the point of purchase, this practice does not indicate the true influence of online advertising as consumers who first heard about a product off-line may have had that message reinforced several times online.

Who’s Calling’s DePina says that because the Internet (largely through search) is used more frequently for research than for purchasing, tracking off-line purchases gives a better indication of the effectiveness of a campaign. For example, some keywords drive clicks used to get more information, while others prompt consumers to make phone calls, he says.

Because only 7 percent of consumer purchases are done online, search marketers need to determine how their activities can result in off-line purchases, according to comScore’s Fulgoni. For example, a survey of comScore panel members showed that 25 percent of people who searched for consumer electronics equipment online made a purchase within 90 days, and 90 percent of those transactions occurred off-line.

Some integrated campaigns mistakenly treat the online and off-line worlds similarly, according to Digital Voodoo’s Evans. For example, companies that sell beer that advertise on the websites of sports networks that they advertise with on TV are missing an opportunity. Instead of this “TV thinking” of lumping consumers together into a category, the Web offers many more options for targeting people based on their individual preferences, he says.

“I expect to be marketed to as if I’m an individual,” Evans says. For example, advertisers could employ behavioral targeting or other tracking mechanisms to better understand the audience.

JOHN GARTNER is a Portland, Ore.-based freelance writer who contributes to Wired News, Inc., MarketingShift and is the Editor of Matter-mag.com.

The Guerrilla Attitude

The attitude of a guerrilla affiliate toward marketing is dramatically different from that of a non-guerrilla affiliate. More than 90 percent of life is about attitude and an even higher percentage of marketing is all about attitude. It’s one of the first things that your prospects and customers will notice about you. The way they’ll know it is through your marketing efforts. If you don’t do much marketing, people will be unaware of your attitude regardless of how winning it may be. Private attitudes do not equate with profits. You’ve got to go public with your attitude.

Let people sense it through your aggressiveness in the marketing arena. It will be clearly communicated through the visibility granted you by marketing. When it’s time to decide on a purchase, they’ll be drawn to companies with an attitude far more than invisible companies that don’t actively and proudly express theirs.

Your attitude will also be indicated by the professionalism of your marketing materials. If they look shabby, that shabbiness will become part of your attitude. If they inspire confidence, that will express your attitude.

The reach of your marketing also reflects your attitude and so does the frequency. Naturally, your commitment to your program conveys an attitude. Your consistency expresses it as well. Keep switching your media and message, your niche and format, and people will be unclear about your attitude, assuming you’re not even sure of yourself.

Of course, you can’t succeed on attitude alone. Marlboro may not be the best-tasting cigarette in the world, but it certainly has the right attitude. Same for Budweiser compared with other beers. Many product category leaders succeed with attitude more than excellence; attitude more than low price; and attitude more than lavish spending. Every car made can get you from point A to point B, but some do it with a more stylish attitude.

As an affiliate, your attitude must come shining through in all of your marketing. It will come across by what you say, how you say it, where you say it and how frequently you say it. Even the world’s most winning attitude is for naught if it’s not being transmitted. That’s why guerrillas communicate with a big attitude to compensate what they lack in a big budget.

The website of a guerrilla affiliate reflects that affiliate’s attitude in its design, its straightforwardness, its focus on the visitor, its copy and its overall professionalism. There are endless possibilities to convey your attitude with your website and certainly with your blog. That means that there are endless possibilities to get egg on your face. Whatever you do to communicate your precious attitude, do it right or don’t do it at all.

There’s a huge, yawning gap of which you must be aware. It’s the gap between what you think your attitude is and what your prospects and customers think it is. Your job – and it’s not even a tough job – is to close that gap, to manifest your attitude so clearly that prospects and customers think of you the same way you think of yourself.

An attitude that is mandatory if you’re to be a true guerrilla affiliate is outwardness. Inward focus works against you when it comes to marketing. Save that for your analyst’s couch, and shine your light outward- bound when you’re marketing.

The perception that you require is the knowledge that your marketing is not about you. It is not about your business. It is not about your product or your service. I hope you’re clear on that, because if you’re not, you’ll blur the other insights necessary for you to master guerrilla marketing.

There is always a very good chance that what you have to offer will mean a lot to your target audience. And there’s a small but real chance that it will mean a great deal to them right now. Those simple facts ought to mean a lot to you before you plunge headlong into a marketing attack. If you can adapt your mindset to just what your offering can mean to your prospects, you’re thinking properly.

If you’ve got the right attitude about marketing, you’re nearly fixated on providing your customers with precisely what they need. One of the things they do need, as do all members of humanity, is a sense of identity. If you operate from the inside of their minds, you’ll be able to make yourself part of their identity. The fact that they do business with you and have a lasting relationship with you will become part of their identity and it will be very clear to their colleagues and friends.

Since your attitude as a guerrilla affiliate is centered around your customers, other facets of your business will follow suit. Your service will pick up and customers will notice. The people you hire will share your attitude, and again, customers will notice. The way you run your business will never seem stale to them because you’ll be innovativing in ways that deliver customer bliss.

Doing it means you can see the future before it unfolds, giving you an immense competitive advantage. It shows you beyond doubt that the best way to engage in customer-oriented marketing is to continuously innovate and to be the very essence of flexibility. In the past, staying with the tried-andtrue was the way to go. In the future, in which today’s present resides, that’s not the way to go.

A guerrilla affiliate knows that focusing on your customer is the way to go, and that "business as usual" now means "business as unusual" if you’re to be a guerrilla with the right attitude, seeing things from your customers’ point of view, meeting and then exceeding their expectations.

That calls for knowing where you’re headed, what your competitors are doing and what your prospects’ customers are thinking. Then it calls for you to demonstrate the attitude that proves you can see things from their standpoint.

JAY CONRAD LEVINSON is the acknowledged father of guerrilla marketing with more than 14 million books sold in his Guerrilla Marketing series, now in 41 languages. His website is gmarketing.com.

Big Brands Believe

TV commercials and print ads aren’t dead yet. Major brands still believe in traditional media. After all, a blockbuster commercial with a catchy jingle can positively boost brand equity. No one cares to dispute the power of a well-placed Madison Avenue ad. But nowadays, marketing teams are increasingly feeling pressure to account for the dollars they spend; they need to show the hard results for money in a real way.

No wonder many marketers are starting to expand their ideas about what constitutes the best-spend blend. While dollars spent on old-fashioned media can positively impact brand image, many major marketers are frustrated by the paucity of accountability in that arena.

Enter the Internet. A decade ago, it was a way to blast banners and burn through a huge amount of cash. Now with access to high-speed connections the norm, and rich-media taken for granted, marketers believe more and more that the low cost, high measurement and constant tweakability make the Internet a magic formula for marketing.

The growth of online ads isn’t showing signs of slowing down and traditional commercial markets are feeling the loss. For example, the up-front market, the time period during which TV networks show their fall lineups and try to sell ad space, is losing its luster. This year the Walt Disney Co. network did well during the up-front, selling $2.3 billion in airtime, a $200 million increase over last year. But the final network TV up-front haul came out to only $9.05 billion, compared with $9.1 billion last year.

“This year the interesting thing is it isn’t just about TV anymore; there are a lot of other places to be worked into these TV buying deals,” says Stacey Shepatin, senior vice president and director of national broadcast at agency Hill Holiday in Boston.

She points out that CBS put the NCAA games on the Web and drew a huge audience. “Content is on the Web, on iTunes and on cell phones. Clients want to be able to reach consumers wherever they are getting their content and for some clients, mobile phone and the Internet make more sense than network TV.” Shepatin says the networks will be aware of this shift and work out up-front packages to please marketers.

AD SPEND UP

Beyond anecdotal evidence of the trend, data backs up the new reality. While many industry observers like to speculate, few have actually pinned down hard numbers. But Universal McCann’s forecaster, Bob Coen, recently revised his estimates for overall U.S. ad spend downward. However, he’s bullish on Internet ad spending and has revised those particular estimates upward. Coen now forecasts that Internet ad spend (excluding search) will amount to $9.705 billion this year, which is a 25 percent increase over 2005.

In December, Coen predicted that online advertising spending would total $8.7 billion in 2006, or an increase of 10 percent over 2004. But in the first quarter of this year online advertising spend increased more than 19 percent from the first quarter of 2005, according to Coen. To give you an idea of the contrast, he now predicts that overall ad spending will increase to $286.4 billion in 2006, a 5.6 percent increase from 2005. In December, he had forecast 5.8 percent growth. The Internet numbers are enough to leave even skeptics believing that this online ad thing has real momentum.

Other numbers also prove the point. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers announced that Internet advertising revenues reached a new record of $3.9 billion for the first quarter of 2006. The 2006 first quarter revenues represent a 38 percent increase over the first quarter 2005 at $2.8 billion and a 6 percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2005 total at $3.6 billion.

Some types of companies are quicker to catch on than others. Not surprisingly, high tech companies are among the first to get hip to trending their ad spends toward the online universe. Yahoo’s chief marketing officer Cammie Dunaway agrees that a commitment to “performance- based marketing,” like the Internet, is more effective than just doing branding on network TV alone. Yahoo has also ventured into getting its brand seen in off-line environments, with a Sheraton hotel deal in which Yahoo sponsors the wi-fi lobby Internet connections. Yahoo plans to continue its much-lauded street marketing stunts but will also continue to refine its online and search efforts.

“I really believe in interactive. Soho Square [New York] is our overall agency that pulls in WPP partners,” Dunaway says. Yahoo did a lot of promotion for its music product and in addition to buying TV spots on the broadcast of the Grammy’s and throwing parties in Miami, it did a lot of online work.

“We had great online creative as well; you could throw Green Day’s equipment with your cursor – we had a fun, engaging online element. OgilvyOne [also in New York] handles online, and ours is very extensive. We do so many online campaigns! Great branding makes your search work harder. In 2006, our marketing will be a blend. We’re do search engine marketing as well as branding – ad campaigns, buzz marketing and partnerships like Sheraton,” Dunaway adds.

Those looking to reach a youth demographic, including large brand advertisers, are spending billions online. Sprite was an early blog advertiser and trailblazed IM ads featuring a hip-hop cartoon personality known as Miles Thirst.

John Vail, director of the interactive marketing group for Pepsi-Cola North America, says the company isn’t as much about clickthroughs. To gauge effectiveness, the soda giant is participating in an experiment run by Yahoo and market research company ACNielsen that tracks the online behavior and offline purchases of about 36,000 U.S. families. PepsiCo Inc. doubled its online display advertising spend in 2005, allocating just 2 percent of its total U.S. spending. But Americans spend close to 20 percent of their time online, so there is a gap.

Advertisers aren’t really taking advantage of the fact that a fifth of our time is spent online. So there’s a great opportunity for even more expansion.

PRINT IS NO LONGER THE KEY

But at least one advertiser has woken up to the reality of the way consumers are currently choosing to view media. Absolut vodka, known for its iconic print ads, is at the cutting edge. It has radically altered its marketing strategy away from print to the Internet. The company says it changed directions because consumers’ tastes were changing and many competitors were entering the marketing.

“Online plays a more important role than print. Print is not the key media anymore,” according to Patric Blixt, communications manager for new media at Absolut in Stockholm. “Our consumer is more focused on the Internet and mobile communication so we’re shifting also. We’re evolving the iconic advertising, making it more inclusive and modern with the same wit and creativity we used in our off-line advertising.”

While Absolut won’t abandon print, outdoor and TV advertising, those media will take a back seat to the Web. “Even if the print media budgets remain larger, the print is now much more seen as the first window into the Absolut world, driving interested users to the whole brand experience online,” Blixt says.

Absolut will increase its online spend to about 20 percent of its media budget. This would account for about an $8 million outlay in the U.S. as the brand spends upwards of $40 million annually.

And Absolut is probably smart to target consumers online. But marketers of electronics would be wise to follow suit. More than 50 percent of Americans were ready to upgrade their home electronics this summer, according to research from Pioneer and Roper. Before they hit the stores, however, 90.2 percent of them went online for product research.

A survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 45 percent of American Internet users have turned to the Web for help with a purchase in the past two years and that 57 percent considered the Internet “the most important source of information,” so many marketers know the Internet is a smart place to be.

Automakers are another group that is riding the wave of the sea change. Ford Motor also dropped its magazine ad allotment from 23.5 percent to 21 percent last year but increased its spending on the Internet to 3.5 percent from 3 percent, according to AdAge.com. The company’s overall ad budget remains flat. General Motors also plans to spend 20 percent of its marketing budgets online this year. Automakers, like Audi and Lexus for example, have been quick to champion emerging media and buy advertising on blogs and podcasts.

TECH TALK

You’d think that technology companies would be at the forefront of parlaying their expertise into taking advantage of the way media is developing. While guerrilla marketing and sponsorships are becoming more popular with tech companies, Internet ad buys are also a big part of their focus. Microsoft is also keen to take advantage of online ads. This year it will spend a hefty $500 million to promote its new “People-Ready” message. However, the long-awaited release of its new operating system (“Longhorn” which was later renamed “Vista”) isn’t slated until 2007, and a new version of Office might not see corporate offices for some time. The company hasn’t announced when it will air ads for either product. But vice president Mich Matthews says Microsoft will spend a nice chunk of its “People-Ready” budget across more ROIeffective media, namely the Internet.

Google has begun selling advertiser image ads, which are displayed on its publisher partner sites. And according to Sheryl Sandberg, vice president of global online sales and operations for Google, the search giant recently introduced a “click to play” advertising service that lets brand advertisers pay fees when visitors click to play video ads, which are often construed as brand ads.

Ad options in the online universe will continue to grow. The variety of newfangled online ads is proliferating. Blog spending increased in 2005, with over $16 million reportedly spent. Podcast advertising earned more than $3 million last year and is forecast to grow, with a projected 2010 revenue of more than $300 million, per research from PQ Media in Stamford, Conn. Companies such as EarthLink, for one, are experimenting with ads on Internet video blogs. And mainstream household names like Whirlpool are testing the waters of podcastlandia.

Meanwhile, traditional media is far from dead. Instead, it is adapting. TV is beginning to mimic the Internet. Not only is it becoming a more on-demand media format (along with TiVO), but it’s also shaping up to be more measurable, too. Several media buyers, such as Zenith and Starcom, have signed on to receive Nielsen’s minute-by-minute ratings data, which will show exactly what viewers are watching. They’ll be able to find out which commercial breaks viewers actually watch. Some agencies are expected to also negotiate prices based on where a commercial falls within a program, or within a commercial break.

eMarketer data shows that large projected increases amount to 24.4 percent in online ad spend, compared with much smaller growth (4.2 percent) for all media.

Things have changed since the late ’90s as advertisers have become more comfortable with the Internet as an advertising medium. It was very easy for them to pull dollars from the Web or ignore it completely, but you just can’t do that today.

During the previous boom, “traditional advertisers hadn’t yet embraced the medium, so growth slowed,” says Denise Garcia, an analyst at WR Hambrecht + Co. “That’s not going to happen again because Procter & Gamble, large auto manufacturers and other companies have said they are decreasing spending on traditional media, like television, in favor of online media.”

Despite frequent reports of its demise, TV advertising is far from dead. JWT, in fact, has bought up all the front-page ads on the news blog site HuffingtonPost.com for one week, inviting users to view, comment on and share some of the agency’s best TV ads. The ads invite users to view JWT commercials for clients such as Ford, HSBC and JetBlue. After clicking, visitors are taken to a separate section where they can see nine different JWT spots, leave comments and forward the link to a friend. Jonah Peretti, a partner at HuffingtonPost.com, said the effort is a joint experiment to see if social media sites are fertile ground for TV ad messages to enjoy a viral effect: “If you make excellent advertising, good content and put it in an environment [where] it can be shared, you can learn a lot about how to improve what you’re doing.”

DIANE ANDERSON is a senior editor at Yoga Journal. She previously worked for the Industry Standard, Brandweek, HotWired and Wired News. She lives in San Francisco.

Fair Game

In-game advertising offers geotargeting of a captive and highly lucrative audience.

National advertisers looking to reach mass audiences have had few choices online. The highly fragmented Web lacks properties that can match the millions of viewers who routinely view network TV.

However, online gaming (not to be confused with online gambling) sites are now accruing the millions of eyeballs that advertisers such as Ford, Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola salivate over. Game publishers can offer interactivity and target marketing that is not possible through broadcast channels, and advertisers are now redirecting portions of their ad spends from broadcast to video games.

In-game advertising provides access to a rapidly growing audience of gamers of all ages that spend the equivalent of two workdays per week (often in three- to five-hour bursts) dealing, driving and detonating through consoles, PCs and Internet-only games. During December 2005, more than 27 million people visited game site MiniClip.com, which features casual games (trivia, cards), shooters and role-playing games, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Unlike content or search sites where visitors routinely look at a few pages before moving on, game sites often retain a visitor for as long as it takes to watch a miniseries, enabling advertisers to repeatedly pitch their brands to consumers. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, people playing games on the Electronic Arts site spent more than four hours and ten minutes per session on average during February 2006. In 2005, the ratings service gave further legitimacy to video game advertising by beginning to measure its audience reach.

Delivering a Focused Audience

Ads delivered to video games (via PCs or connected consoles such as the Xbox) will have greater retention because unlike TV viewers, game players tend not to multitask, according to Nicholas Longano, president of new media at online gaming company Massive, Inc. Players who are being chased through the galaxy by aliens or are racing their fellow avatars to capture booty aren’t likely to be simultaneously talking on their cell phones or surfing the Web.

Unlike television ads that viewers with digital video recorders are increasingly skipping over, gaming ads are always seen, according to Longano. “Advertising in video games is TiVo-proof,” he says. Longano says the ads that are displayed on Massive’s network of 137 games are guaranteed to be onscreen for a minimum of 10 seconds. The company’s network features ads from “65 blue chip” advertisers, he says, and features games from Acclaim Entertainment, Ubisoft, and Vivendi Universal Games.

In May, Microsoft acquired Massive, and said that it would integrate Massive’s technology into its adCenter advertising platform.

Advertisers go where the people are, and the masses playing games online are an attractive audience to pitch. While the dominant demographic of gamers is the desirable 18- to 34-year-old male audience, the wide variety of games are attracting a diverse membership, according to Alexis Madrigal, a research analyst with DFC Intelligence.

Action games tend to attract younger male players while casual playing of puzzle, card and word games have made females over 30 the fastest-growing segment of the online gaming world. Casual game sites are also increasing the titles aimed at mature adults and children.

Game enthusiasts are also more likely to interact with what they see online than the average Web surfer, according to Alex Kakoyiannis, managing partner of consulting firm Navigame. “Gamers are a participatory group … the whole game experience is based on interaction and participation, [so they exhibit a] different behavior.”

Revenue from advertisements delivered online to video games is expected to rise from $192 million in 2005 to $248 million this year, according to Madrigal, who says ads in offline games were not included in his calculations. The majority of ad dollars are spent on casual games and PC-based titles played online, according to Madrigal, as the more sophisticated console games have yet to fully exploit connected game play.

Ads at Every Turn

Unlike commercial television that displays ads after several minutes of programming, game sites can almost continually interject ads before, during and after gaming. In-game ads are woven within the game to appear natural to the environment, showing up on virtual billboards, posters and video screens on the online world. Navigame’s Kakoyiannis says the ads have to be contextually relevant to the game and the audience. “You shouldn’t see a product targeted to women in a shooter,” he says.

For example, Tycoon City from Atari features an ad for Toys”R”Us in downtown Manhattan, where the company has a real-life presence. Similarly, Take-Two Interactive Software’s Major League Baseball 2K6 will feature rotating ads behind the backstop and on the facades, just as they appear in the real ballparks.

Jonathan Epstein, a member of the board of directors of Double Fusion, which develops technologies for online advertisers, says in-game ads are tracked to verify their delivery. Data is collected to show how many times and for how long within a game session an impression (for example an ad in the form of a virtual billboard) is served.

Epstein says it’s also important that the ad-serving system prevents competing products (such as Coke and Pepsi) from being advertised within close proximity or time frame within a game. The typical CPM for in-game ads is between $20 and $25 for one-dimensional ads, and from $40 to $50 for three-dimensional ads, according to Epstein.

In-game advertising does not disrupt game play and limits interactivity to before and after a game, says Epstein, who has collaborated with publishers including Midway Games and Crave Entertainment. For example, clickable video ads called “level-stitials” can run after a level of a game is completed, or static ads can be placed on exit screens or leaderboards at the conclusion of a game, he says.

The various formats and locations for displaying ads provide vast inventories. With an average of 20 to 30 ads displayed per game-hour, according to Epstein, games that average 90 million hours of game play per month could potentially display 2 billion ads per month. Most game companies have their own formats for ads, but there is an interest in developing sizes compatible with the standards set by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Product placement within games is becoming a popular method for game developers to offset some of the development cost. For example, makers of racing games will partner with an auto manufacturer to make their vehicles the default car. However, sometimes (as with the rhetorical question about the chicken and the egg), it is difficult for gamers to determine whether game development proceeds product placement, or whether the prominent display of well-known brands is the genesis of the game itself.

Another example of a product being placed within games includes Ubisoft’s upcoming title CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder, which will feature credit card company Visa’s fraud-monitoring system to track down the bad guys.

“Advergaming” is the term given to games that are developed specifically to showcase a product, and where the advertiser subsidizes the development cost. Atom Entertainment created Hemi Highway to showcase the Dodge Charger, and the company recently launched the Shockwave.com Game Studios division to focus on advergame development.

Advergaming finances the creation of casual arcade-style games where the graphics and story are not as sophisticated as console games, but the often-humorous game play can nonetheless become addictive. “Building a custom game is a minimum of a $200,000 investment,” Lee Uniacke, vice president of sales for Atom Entertainment, says.

Atom Entertainment’s advergaming group links advertisers with game developers who create titles around a product. “It forces them to be creative within a structure, and this enables their true creativity to come out,” says Uniacke, of the game development process.

Uniacke says the amount of revenue the company is generating from advertising has tripled this year over last, thanks in part to the Shockwave In-Game Network (SIGN), which launched in November. SIGN games includes five titles such as Circuit Racer and H2Overdose that display in-game advertisements and require a minimum of a $30,000 spend from advertisers, according to Uniacke.

Online gaming sites generally require users to register to play, giving publishers the ability to target ads to specific demographics. Shockwave.com’s ad-serving system can control ad campaigns so that they only appear before 13- to 21-year-old males, and the company also can geotarget campaigns to specific regions, according to Uniacke.

Uniacke says advertisers can test-market campaigns online and get instant data on their effectiveness before rolling out a national campaign through broadcast. “Instead of spending four months on a campaign, you can get feedback within a day,” he says, adding that the cost is analogous to an $8 CPM.

Displaying ads around the games (on login screens and on the borders of online games) can also be lucrative for publishers. For example, casual game site Pogo.com served nearly 950 million ads during February 2006, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Gaming company WildTangent offers advertiser sponsorships of casual games such as Polar Bowler and Tornado Jockey, according to Bill Clifford, general manager of advertising platforms. Sponsors receive a 15- or 30-second pregame video advertisement, Clifford says.

To get developers interested in creating games that feature advertising, WildTangent shares the ad revenue with the game’s creators, says Clifford. Typically developers would get paid when a consumer chooses to pay to download a game, but receive no compensation when gamers play the free trial version online. WildTangent’s program can increase the developer’s compensation “by 10 times over what they were receiving,” he says.

Earlier this year WildTangent announced a program where gamers can earn virtual incentives by watching ads. The companies’ virtual “WildCoins” can be used to purchase additional game play time with the company’s pay-for games, or they can be redeemed within games for health points or weapons.

WildTangent is extending the virtual booty offering offline, as consumers who purchase real goods from partners including Coca-Cola will receive WildCoins coupons that can be used online, according to Clifford.

Ads Cut Game Costs

Many online casual games and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games are financed by subscription fees, but in-gaming advertising is likely to supplement or even replace this revenue stream.

Worldwide online game subscription revenue grew 43 percent to $1.84 billion in 2005 and could reach $6.8 billion by 2011; according to video-gaming market research firm DFC Intelligence. Once games reach more than a million registered users, publishers could lower the subscription fees or make the games free by attracting national advertisers.

Popular MMOs Shadowbane and Anarchy Online now offer free levels of the game that are ad-supported. DFC Intelligence’s Alexis Madrigal says games such as Runescape 4, which currently has 4 million subscribers who each pay $5 a month, could increase reach and revenue if advertising were integrated. “You could squeeze $5 worth of advertising out of each user easily,” says Madrigal.

However, fantasy role-playing games located in alien worlds or occurring during the days of yore aren’t natural locations for conventional ads. Madrigal also warns that publishers that display online ads through console or PC games risk alienating their audience. “If you are paying $50 for a game and then $15 a month for a subscription, the tolerance for ads is pretty low,” he says.

The increase in broadband adoption and console games that can be played online will grow the virtual communities of game enthusiasts who log in for hours at a time. As long as the ads are prevented from overwhelming game play, game companies will continue to capture advertising dollars from broadcast.

JOHN GARTNER is a freelance writer in Portland, Ore. He is a former editor at Wired News and CMP. His articles regularly appear on Wired.com, AlterNet.org and in MIT’s TechnologyReview.com.

The Best Intentions

Effective self-marketing is the quickest path to success.

Whether you know it or not, you’re marketing yourself every day – to lots of people. You’re marketing yourself in a quest to make a sale, warm up a relationship, get a job, get connected, get something you deserve. You’re always sending messages about yourself.

Guerrillas control the messages that they send. It’s all about intention. Guerrillas live intentionally. Non-guerrillas send unintentional messages, even if those messages sabotage their overall goals in life. They want to close a sale for a consulting contract, but their inability to make eye contact or their confusing email message turns off the prospect.

Avoid Unintentional Messages

Unintentional messages erect an insurmountable barrier. Your job is to be sure there is no barrier. There are really two people within you – your accidental self and your intentional self. Most people are able to conduct about 95 percent of their lives by intent. But that’s not enough.

It’s the other 5 percent that can get you in trouble – or in clover. I’m not talking about phoniness here. The idea is for you to be who you are and not who you aren’t – to be aware of what you’re doing, aware of whether or not your actions communicate ideas that will help you get what you truly deserve.

Who do you market to without even realizing it? Employees. Customers. Prospects. Teachers. Parents. Children. Bosses. Prospective employers. Mates. Prospective mates. Friends. Sellers. Landlords. Neighbors. Professionals. Members of the community. The police. Service people. Family. Bankers. These people can help you or stop you from getting what you deserve. You can influence them with how you market yourself.

To market yourself properly, answer these three questions:

Who are you now – if friends described you, what would they say? Be honest.
What do you want out of life? Be specific for the best results.
How will you know when you’ve reached your goals?

If you can’t answer these questions, you’re doomed to accidental marketing and spending your life reacting instead of responding, and the odds will be against you reaching your goals.

How do you send messages and market yourself right now? With your appearance, to be sure. You also market with your eye contact and body language, your habits, your speech patterns. You market yourself in print with your letters, email, website, notes, faxes, brochures and other printed material. You also market yourself with your attitude and ethics.

Again, you may not be aware of it, but people are constantly judging and assessing you by noticing many things. You must be sure your marketing message doesn’t conflict with your dreams. What are people using to base their opinions, to make their decisions about you? I’ve come up with more than 30 variables, but here are the top 10:

Clothing
Enthusiasm
Neatness
Tone of voice
Energy level
Eye contact
Writing ability
Spelling
Business card
Availability

You’re fully aware of your intentional marketing, and you invest time, energy and imagination into it, not to mention money. But you may be undermining that investment if you’re not paying attention to things that matter to others even more than what you say. These are things such as keeping promises, punctuality, honesty, demeanor, respect, gratitude, sincerity, feedback, initiative and reliability. People also notice passion – or the absence of it. They notice how well you listen to them.

How to Market Yourself

Now that you know these things, what should you do? Ben Franklin said that three of the hardest things in the world are diamonds, steel and knowing yourself. Here’s a three-step plan to get you started on the road to self-awareness and self-marketing acumen.

Write a positioning statement about yourself. Identify just who you are and the positive things that stand out most about you.
Identify your goals. Put into writing the three things you’d most like to achieve during the next three months, three years and 10 years.
State your measuring stick. Write the details of how you will know when you’ve achieved your goals. Be brief and specific.

To guerrilla market yourself, simply be aware of and in control of the messages you send. Do so and your goals will be a lot easier to attain.

Look at your policies, procedures and daily management practices. What behaviors are you measuring and rewarding? Examine your purchasing and pricing practices – these impact your brand far more than anything you might say in your ads. Finally, look at your website through the eyes of your customers – you’ll begin to glimpse the truth of your brand.

Taking Action

Examine the soul of your company through your daily actions, not your beliefs, and you’ll soon be able to write branding ads that will ring like a bell. Behold the keys to successful brand writing:

Truth in advertising. Bad ads are filled with phrases you like to say about yourself. Good ads are filled with what your customers say about you when you’re not around. To be successful, your branding ads must sharply echo the word on the street about your company. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, got it right when he said, "It has always seemed to me that your brand is formed primarily not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does." You’ll discover the truth behind your brand when you can explain why customers come back.

Overstatement is passé. Offer proof to back up what you say, even if it lies only in your customers’ experience or assumptions. Branding isn’t just about the facts: People buy brands with their hearts as well as their heads. Brand loyalty is built on the fact that our purchases remind us – and tell the world around us – who we are.

Search for evocative words. Sniff out overused phrases. Stimulate customers’ minds with thoughts more interesting than the ones they were previously thinking.

Be consistent. The consistent use of the same colors and fonts is often called "branding." Your brand should remain constant in all communications from your company, including your website, email, brochures, business cards and so on.

Brands are built on consistency, the roots of which are patience and attention to detail. It’s going to take a lot longer to build your brand than you feel it should. Here’s the bottom line: If you think you’re going to be able to measure brand progress at the end of 12 short months, you’re dreaming. Brand development isn’t measured in months, but in years. Good luck with your brand.

Remember always that you are your own brand, and that if you’re not guerrilla marketing yourself, you are falling short of what you ought to be doing.

JAY CONRAD LEVINSON is the acknowledged father of guerrilla marketing with more than 14 million books sold in his Guerrilla Marketing series, now in 41 languages. His websites can be found at www.gmarketing.com and www.guerrillamarketingassociation.com.

An Unbridled Love of Shopping: Q & A with Michelle Madhok

Michelle Madhok has a lot of experience mixing content and commerce online. She has worked at CBS Broadcasting as a director of entertainment marketing for the new media group and was group director of editorial products for AOL. Madhok understands the power of promotion when it comes to the world of online shopping. Her latest venture, SheFinds.com, offers information to busy women who don’t have time to read five-pound fashion magazines to keep on top of the latest styles. The site, which is packed with information about the must-haves in beauty and fashion, features a daily blog and an online forum that underscores her mission and motto: “We shop the Web so you don’t have to.” With 16,000 subscribers and approximately 300,000 unique visitors per month, SheFinds.com blends Madhok’s ideas about melding editorial and e-commerce.

Madhok recently talked with Revenue writer Alexandra Wharton about the value that affiliates offer merchants for building their brands. She also expounded on her thought that sites, such as SheFinds.com, should be treated as any other form of media. Madhok claims that because affiliates can help retailers reach new customers and niche markets, they should not be limited to commission-only compensation. For Madhok it’s all part of the importance of value-add partnerships and relationships in the world of online merchandising.

The newly married Madhok talked with Wharton, also a recent bride, about her fall wedding, which she pulled together through websites – many of them affiliate sites. This inspired Madhok to purchase the URL for WiredBride.com, her latest idea to create an online shopping guide for brides.

Alexandra Wharton: What was the inspiration for SheFinds.com?

Michelle Madhok: When I was at AOL, I became the beauty director and we started a column called Ms. M. It promoted beauty products every month. It did really well. We started offering swag – we would put up some kind of cosmetic and it would sell out. One time we had to contact a factory to get more of a certain color we had promoted. It really showed me that content and commerce was going to work.

So I’ve been very interested in mixing content and commerce for a long time. I’d been pitching it at AOL over and over but I couldn’t really get any traction with the bureaucracy and its changing management. So I went home and started this business and we’ve been doing very well. It has been almost 18 months now and we have 16,000 subscribers today. It’s all been word of mouth. Every Tuesday we send a “style mail,” and every Thursday we send a “sale mail.” The thing about these subscribers is that they are highly qualified. At AOL I learned that you can have a ton of impressions and it does nothing for you. It’s more important to have really quality people, even if it’s a smaller audience, because they buy.

We launched SheFindsMom.com five months ago, because we were getting a lot of interest about kids’ clothes and maternity stuff. So we decided to separate that off. I very much believe in psychographics, not demographics. For example, you and I are both brides, and we’re interested in the same thing that a 24-year old bride is – you know, we both need to know about cake toppers or whatever.

AW: What is your biggest category?

MM: Our biggest category seller, which kind of surprised me, has been underwear. We are working very closely with Bare Necessities. We figured out how to do a “Zagat” guide to underwear. We email people about their favorite underwear. And, believe it or not, people are passionate about bras and underwear and shape-wear. So we sold a ton of underwear. Dan Sackrowitz of Bare Necessities and I did a presentation at the LinkShare Symposium. Bare Necessities has made more than $2.50 per name from the SheFinds.com subscriber list.

AW: Can you comment on the benefits of value-add partnerships for merchandising?

MM: We frequently feature eLuxury.com as a place to buy luxury goods. We’ve moved $20,000 worth of merchandise for them this year, and remember, this is on a list that just reached 15,000 subscribers. I also know that there have been thousands of dollars in non-commissionable sales because we’ve exceeded the return days. We sell big-ticket items for them – $1,000 Louis Vuitton bags. I think it’s very valuable that they are reaching our highly qualified audience. We are providing brand awareness for them, and I think that they are beginning to understand that and support us with ad buys.

AW: Do you spend most of your time working on affiliate relationships with merchants?

MM: The affiliate thing is a little bit of a conundrum for me because I feel like sometimes affiliates/retailers – they don’t distinguish between different affiliate sites and they [merchants] treat us as the sweat-shop workers of the Internet. I feel with some sites – they [merchants] only want to do things on commission and I don’t think that’s right. I feel like you’re paying to have placement in magazines, you’re paying to have placement in newspapers, you’re paying to have placement on television, why should you disregard the branding opportunity I bring you?

I’ve been saying my new thing is I don’t work on a purely commission basis. In editorial I do that. But if you want ad placement, or some special email, we work on a combination. Basically, if you do affiliate links with me, I’ll take 20 percent off my rate card. But you are still going to pay a placement fee. Because I believe that I am building your brand. We did this thing with SmartBargains.com – we did a combination. They did really well. And a lot of people told me they had never heard of Smart Bargains before. I’m building awareness, and who knows how much of a value that person is in a life span? I think that we should be treated the same as other media. On the other hand, coupon sites can live off of 5 percent commission or whatever people want to pay.

I don’t like that we get lumped into the same area because I’m trying to create a quality product and get you the best users that you want and create your brand image. If you’re going to throw yourself up on a coupon platform, yes, they’re going to make more because they play dirty. They spam the search engines, they post codes that are out of date, and they don’t keep things up. Yes, they make a lot more money than I do, so I can’t compete with it. I really feel like that’s a problem that affiliate marketing is having right now.

AW: Do you work with a network?

MM: I work with Commission Junction and LinkShare. I work with pretty much all of them.

AW: And do the networks help you to attract new merchants?

MM: Well, LinkShare has gotten to be much more helpful. I’m doing a bunch of holiday – it’s Q4 – and so they just brought me some advertisers. I think this is kind of a new hybrid of part placement fee, part brand image, and it works for everybody. They brought me Godiva and Apple. I didn’t come from a sales background so I need to figure out how to get on the brand advertiser radar.

In the magazine industry it’s clear that if I scratch your back, you’ll scratch mine. They don’t talk about it, but you will see that all the beauty products that are pitched are also advertised in the magazine. We definitely have editorial integrity; we definitely don’t pick anything that we don’t think is good. But we also think that if all things are equal, we want to go with the company that’s supporting us. Almost every company now has an affiliate relationship. For instance, we are working with Bare Necessities – they were one of our first big supporters. So if we are going to write something about underwear, then we usually use them, and also they usually can get discounts for our readers. For our 2006 underwear guide, I asked our readers, “What is your favorite underwear?” I had someone write me back and say, “Mine is Hanky Panky; can you get us one of those Bare Necessities deals?” So you see that we have built up some brand equity for them by working together.

AW: Does anyone ever ask, ‘What happened to the separation between church and state?’ Do people understand that this is an affiliate relationship?

MM: I don’t publicize it in the newsletter. But I could write bad editorial with no affiliate links and then I think people will leave you anyway. I mean look at the growth of magazines like Lucky and Shop Etc. Even the Bliss catalog has become hugely successful. You have to provide a good product no matter what. So if you become a complete shill, then I think people will turn away from you.

AW: You say on your website: “I don’t push anything that I myself wouldn’t wear.”

MM: Right. Also the playing field has become equal. Everybody’s an affiliate. At this point, it’s not like I have to pick from a small amount [of websites]. Pretty much anything I write about is [from] an affiliate site.

AW: Interesting.

MM: The shoes that we pick quite often are from Zappos.com. They have an enormous inventory, and they have free shipping and free returns. So that to me is a client bonus.

AW: So you planned your whole wedding through the Internet and a lot through affiliate sites?

MM: The No. 1 affiliate site I used was eBay. Now I think eBay is a great place to get things. I got my shape-wear through eBay, because it was sold out on my lingerie sites, BareNecessities.com and FigLeaves.com. I got my veil off of eBay. But some of the stuff was not necessarily through affiliate sites, although I did definitely peruse them and would suggest others. For instance, StyleBug.com and EdressMe .com are carrying simple wedding dresses, which is a genius thing because the wedding dress industry is a complete racket. I was invited to sample sales so I ended up buying four dresses. I sold two on the site PreOwnedWeddingDress.com.

For instance, I get hit up by jewelry designers all of the time. I ended up having one of them (www.jeannenicole.com) make custom necklaces for my bridesmaids. Another one I was looking at was on a site called Trunkt.com; they are actually an affiliate site. And I found a site through them called Indigo Handloom.com, which has these beautiful shawls. So I ended up getting the shawls for the bridesmaids and for myself. And they’re woven with this silk called mugo, which is from India, and it’s supposed to be good luck. An affiliate site for groomsmen’s ties is Fozieri.com. I shopped for cupcakes online and used Evite for the pre-wedding parties.

AW: Did you order your wedding invitations online?

MM: My parents did it, but I’m familiar with how they did it. I did order some things from ChelseaPaper.com. I ordered thank-you cards from them.

AW: Did you buy your bridesmaids’ dresses online?

MM: Everyone picked their own strapless black dress. I sent suggestions as links from BlueFly.com and Nordstrom.com.

AW: How about the location for the wedding?

MM: Well, I definitely used the Internet to search. I was looking for some type of outdoor space, like a hotel. TheKnot.com has lots of reviews. And Craigslist.com was indispensable for the wedding. I found the reverend on Craigslist. I found my wedding coordinator on Craigslist and my video guy on Craigslist. It was nice to not have to troll stores looking for things. And I wanted to have gold shoes, and I was able to set up with eBay so they would email me every time gold shoes were listed.

AW: That’s a good idea.

MM: I found my seamstress through a site called ManhattanUsersGuide.com. I found on Craigslist my makeup guy as well. As for the rings, I didn’t buy them, so I didn’t buy those online, although I did search for styles online. I left it up to [my husband]. There’s a diamond guy in the diamond district here [in New York], so that’s where everyone buys.

AW: Will your website, WiredBride.com, be an affiliate site?

MM: I don’t like the term affiliate site ” that implies we are only out to push the retailer’s promotions. We build sites to help women shop, and brides have a lot of very confusing shopping to do. We will use affiliate links where applicable.

ALEXANDRA WHARTON is an editor at Montgomery Research, Inc., Revenue’s parent company. During her four years at MRI, she has edited publications about CRM, supply chain, human performance and healthcare technology. Previously she worked at Internet consulting firm marchFIRST (formerly USWeb/CKS).

Look Ma, No Print: Q & A with Michelle Bottomley

Traditional Madison Avenue advertising agencies have taken their share of lumps lately. More companies are spending bigger bucks to advertise online than ever before. Overall spending on advertising is expected to reach $279 billion this year.

That’s a 5.4 percent jump over 2004. However, Internet advertising is forecast to grow 15 percent over last year and hit nearly $8 billion by the end of the year.

The trend has been building for years, but now many traditional ad agencies are scrambling to change or be left behind.

Ogilvy & Mather is one of the world’s largest ad agencies, with annual revenues of $752 million, and is among those that have quickly adapted to the changing online environment. The agency’s OgilvyOne is a leader in customer relationship management and interactive advertising. As general manager of consulting for OgilvyOne North America, Michelle Bottomley is at the forefront of the seismic advertising shift and is responsible for the data, strategy and direct channels (teleweb, email marketing, partner marketing) practices at the agency.

She joined Ogilvy in 1998 to lead the direct and interactive marketing engagements for the firm’s travel and transportation accounts. Two years later she branched into other areas and launched the relationship marketing practice. During her career, Bottomley has led targeted marketing initiatives on behalf of a number of brands including American Express, Cisco, DuPont, Enfamil, FM Global, Ford Motor Co., Jaguar, Nestle and Unilever.

Prior to joining Ogilvy, Bottomley was vice president of marketing at Epsilon, an American Express subsidiary, where she led teams responsible for the development of marketing data warehouses, statistical analyses, loyalty marketing programs and data-driven marketing communications as the client service director for Amtrak, BizTravel.com, Dayton Hudson, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, ITT Sheraton, Nordstrom and Walt Disney Attractions. Bottomley also managed comarketing partnerships between American Express, Amtrak and United Airlines. She began her direct marketing career at Bronner Slosberg Humphrey (Digitas).

Revenue Editor Lisa Picarille spoke with Bottomley to discuss the current state of advertising, what’s happening with big brands online and why the Net has become such an attractive option for advertisers over the last couple of years. They also discussed what Ogilvy has done to adapt to shifting client needs and where advertising – both traditional and online – is going over the next few years. It’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all world when it comes to advertising online, Bottomley says.

LISA PICARILLE: Do you think traditional creative agencies have lost their way and their relevance?

MICHELLE BOTTOMLEY: The need for a clear and compelling brand proposition creatively expressed is not going to change. Great traditional agencies define an ownable and compelling brand proposition that reflects the passions and strength of the organization. Being able to define the soul of the brand and establish a unifying message architecture that can be expressed through every communications touch point is among the most important marketing challenges and the core strength of a traditional creative agency.

LP: Why have most agencies been slow to adapt to the change brought by online?

MB: For the most part, agencies, and certainly Ogilvy, [are] leading the revolution to make online or digital marketing a more prominent part of the communications mix. A key debate in the next two years will be the role digital media plays in the overall mix among agencies, their clients and the major media-planning-and-buying organizations.

Agencies need to push this forward through understanding the target and developing innovative digital brand-building ideas to reach them, but clients and media organizations will need to reallocate existing budgets to bring these ideas to the marketplace. In 2004 Ogilvy launched VERGE, a series of conferences for the agency and clients that feature top thinkers and companies in the new media space, to forward progress in this area.

LP: What is Ogilvy doing to adapt?

MB: Ogilvy’s 360-degree branding is a philosophy and approach that integrates marketing communications to build client businesses. As an extension of our 360-degree branding philosophy we are working on ways to integrate the best of the advertising world with the best of our direct and interactive capabilities in the areas of creative, production, strategy and analytics.

This integration will improve our ability to target smarter and bring ideas that embrace broad and targeted media, including online, to our clients, as we have done already with the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. This campaign has driven considerable business growth for Unilever, and lives online, on digital billboards, out of home and in print in the United States and around the world as one campaign.

LP: How has the change been received by your clients?

MB: Very well. Our clients will always ask for big brand ideas, but more and more for the use of nontraditional media, which includes digital marketing via online, digital phones, digital billboards, etc. – media that can surround the targets where they live, work and play. We believe that digital media are a tremendous opportunity for brands to deliver unique messages and offers to their targets and achieve superior ROI from their marketing investment.

LP: How hard of a pitch is it to convince big brands of the importance of the online adspend?

MB: Not hard at all, and it’s been getting better. Big brands such as IBM and Ameritrade have long understood the importance of digital marketing and have incorporated it as a significant portion of their marketing plans. Our largest clients are pushing digital marketing further through the use of behavioral advertising, personalized messages, long-form video and dynamic marketing responses to interactions and to improve conversion of hand-raisers to buyers. There is more experimentation than ever before around bringing the right targets into the marketing funnel and nurturing those leads to accelerate conversion to sales using a combination of digital marketing.

LP: What about branding? A few years ago most concluded branding couldn’t be done online. Has that changed?

MB: Some of the most relevant branding is happening online – in the context of where the target is already going for trusted advice and information. IBM led the way in this area through their sponsorship of the Olympics and U.S. Open years ago, using online to broadcast events and scores “powered by IBM.” Online marketing has helped brands move beyond product-specific advertising to creating branded experiences as a way to foster an emotional connection. BMW films were famous years ago for attracting and swaying the right audience online through edutainment – building the brand – while sparking hand-raisers to come in and test drive.

LP: Are big brands increasing online ad spending?

MB: Yes, and even a few percentage points from traditional budgets start to show big increases in online spending.

LP: What about the traditional ad formula doesn’t work online?

MB: The old model of one-size-fits-all messages has evolved to include more use of search and contextual messages based on where the target is seeing the ad or where they have been before online. There is more testing now to optimize clickthrough rates and conversions using search, contextual messages and behavioral advertising alone and in combination.

LP: How has the adoption of broadband changed online advertising?

MB: The adoption of broadband by more households means we can reach more people with rich media, giving marketers the opportunity to blend edutainment into their online advertising as a way to attract more eyeballs and convert them to prospects.

LP: How has online advertising changed the type of account executive agencies hire? Do they have additional talents not seen in traditional advertising?

MB: Account executives equipped for the new world understand the art and science of marketing in a way they didn’t before, owing to the fact this media is so targeted and measurable. We look for account executives experienced with target definition and brand building along the customer journey from awareness to hand-raising and repeat purchase.

LP: How important is online advertising to Ogilvy’s overall strategy?

MB: Hugely important.

LP: Define what it means to be an ad agency in 2005.

MB: Being an agency in 2005 means being flexible, assembling the right people with expertise from a number of areas to solve big client challenges. Fewer are the days when the advertising team would create the brand idea and express it as a 30-second spot to be adapted by the direct team using mail and the interactive team online.

More are the cases of bringing specialists from all three areas together up front to develop innovative ways to define and express the brand proposition in the marketplace. This is one of the best times ever to be in the agency business.

LP: What’s the downside of online advertising – for client and for consumers?

MB: While the nuisance factor of one-size-fits-all pop-ups can be a downside for consumers, the advances in technology are allowing marketers to be smarter about how to engage the consumer online without appearing to be advertising.

LP: How do brands get heard above all the noise on the Internet?

MB: Be relevant, and seek to build a dialogue with the target in a way that opens and nurtures a relationship and value exchange.

LP: Describe the state of online advertising two years from now.

MB: Two years from now online advertising will expand to really be considered digital marketing and include digital billboards, digital phones, interactive TV, digital billboards, retail signage, etc.

Smart marketers will use these channels to enhance the brand experience, delivering more relevant messages and offers – and reflecting target response and prior relationships to refine that relevance in a synchronized way across these digital channels. Measurement of this relevance and synchronicity will provide marketers the opportunity to optimize the yield of their marketing investments, focusing on those digital channels that bring in the best leads and the combination of channels that optimize conversion of those leads at the most favorable ROI. This is among the best and most challenging times to be a marketer.

LP: What are the major hurdles for companies that have never done online advertising, and how do you convince them it’s right for them?

MB: More and more brands understand the needs of their customers and finding a way to deliver on them online. This doesn’t need to look like product-centric advertising, but instead creating branded experiences that provide a call to interact with the brand. A major hurdle for companies that have never done online advertising can be perceptions around channel conflict; for example, whether a dedicated salesforce would perceive direct communications as threatening their ability to represent and deliver the brand. In this case a tremendous opportunity exists to reach the target online and can take the form less of product-centric messaging and more of creating branded experiences online.

LP: In what ways does online advertising impact the advertisers’ ability to establish relationships with their customers?

MB: Online advertising provides a great entree into a relationship with a brand. Those brands that have been able to provide a compelling offer and deliver on that with an ongoing stream of highly relevant communications are the ones beginning to unlock the potential of this medium.

We have to think of online advertising as the start of a conversation, and the more we understand from that individual the better we can make the follow-up conversations. Smart marketers are mapping out the relationship pathway from online advertising to relationship nurturing as a way to convert more of the leads at the top of the funnel into qualified prospects and ultimately customers. Thinking about online advertising as one component of the overall marketing mix with a very specific role, with defined follow- up treatment, takes little time up front and delivers big payoff in the form of a lead pool and new customers.

Off the Mark

Affiliates and Web publishers who sell goods from the most popular brand name merchants are losing traffic and revenue to Web sites that lure consumers by deceiving them with unauthorized use of trademarked products.

This happens when a Web publisher embeds the most popular brand names into their site in order to attract consumers who are using a search engine to find specific products. These visitors are often directed to Web sites that sell similar products, but not the specific ones they were looking for. Instead, consumers see rival products.

For example, a consumer types “Nike” into a search engine and is directed to a Web site that sells sneakers made by rival Reebok, but not those made by Nike. In this scenario, the consumer may get frustrated and move on to another site that does sell Nikes. Or they might buy one of the competitive offerings. This means the offending Web site profits and has less incentive to stop these deceptive practices.

This very common tactic has upset consumers, the makers of popular brand name products, as well as affiliates authorized to sell these products. In an attempt to stop such behavior, there have been several high-profile lawsuits in which brand names such as Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Nike and Geico Insurance have sued specific Web publishers and search engines to control their own brands on the Internet.

These lawsuits raise a key question: Can one corporation prevent another from linking to its trademarked, for-profit Web site?

The answer is not easy to determine. Many companies are testing the limits of trademark law by suing alleged Internet trademark abusers for infringement. So far the results have been mixed.

Terence Ross, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a Washington, D.C., law firm, has represented plaintiffs in cases against adware makers Claria and WhenU. “Unfortunately, there is no more certainty as to what the law is than a year ago,” he says. “There have been a number of court decisions on either side of the issue.”

An August 2004 decision by the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia delivered a blow to search engine giants Google and Overture Services in their efforts to defend ad sales of trademarks as “fair use.”

But that changed in December when a federal judge ruled that Google’s advertising policy doesn’t violate federal trademark laws. Google will now be allowed to sell ads to rival insurance companies whenever Geico’s name is typed into the Google search box.

Geico sued Google and Overture in May 2004, saying that use of its trademarks when selling advertising in search engines constituted trademark infringement and raised various state law causes of action. Google filed a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that it had no legal merit and that the state claims were insufficiently pleaded.

The August ruling, which allowed insurance giant Geico to sue Google and Overture for allegedly selling advertisements linked to its trademark, could have threatened the livelihood of the search engines. Overture, which is owned by Yahoo, and Google make money by selling ads linked to keyword-triggered search results, and many commercially driven searches are tied to trademarked brands such as Geico or Nike.

Google attorneys cited the U-Haul International v. WhenU case, in which the moving-truck company alleged trademark infringement against WhenU for displaying rivals’ pop-up ads over its Web page. The court found in favor of WhenU, because it only used U-Haul’s marks for “pure machine-linking function,” Google argued.

For its part, Geico cited the Playboy v. Netscape and Excite case, in which the Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals in San Francisco found that the two online portals created consumer confusion when using Playboy trademarks to sell banner ads. That suit took five years to settle.

More Legal Battles

Many of the cases are settled before they ever reach the court, with smaller sites often removing the trademarked terms to avoid a costly legal battle. There are some high-profile cases that are still pending. Many are closely watching the trademark suit filed by American Blind and Wallpaper Factory against Google along with its partners Netscape and Ask Jeeves.

The suit, filed in January 2004 in a New York federal court, claims Google’s practice of selling text ads related to keyword search terms takes advantage of American Blind’s trademarks, because rivals’ ads can appear on results pages turned up by searches for “American wallpaper” and “American blind.”

American Blind had threatened to file the lawsuit last year. That, in turn, prompted Google, in a filing with the US District Court for the Northern District of California, to argue that “American” and “blind” and other words American Blind was claiming as trademarks are descriptive terms and shouldn’t enjoy trademark protection.

The company disagrees. “We spend millions of dollars annually to build brand awareness and cannot stand idle while Google allows our competitors to ride our coattails,” according to a statement from Steve Katzman, CEO of American Blind, which says it has spent more than 50 years and $70 million building its reputation.

American Blind says the outcome of this suit will have repercussions for other businesses that include generic words in their names, such as General Motors and National Car Rental System, which could also be targeted for keyword-based advertising.

What About The Networks?

And while some affiliates are relying on the courts to protect them, others think it is the responsibility of the networks to stop this practice. However, some say the networks gain from helping affiliates profit from brand confusion.

“These people are interested in making money, and when a trademark is infringed on, they are still getting paid,” said one affiliate who asked not to be named. “It’s not in their best interest financially to enforce or police rules to try to stop these unethical practices.”

One affiliate manager says that networks are supposed to be the trusted party in this equation, and they must try to uphold fair business standards.

“The industry is failing to recognize that there is widespread use of trademarked keywords,” says Alan Schneider, president of R U on the Net, an affiliate manager, who has stopped many of his affiliates from using trademarks.

However, he also notes that when affiliates in his network were asked to cease and desist from using trademarks or competitors’ URLs in their advertising, their sales often dropped by as much as 80 percent.

Search For Tomorrow

Search engines are also profiting from brand confusion. Both Overture and Google allow marketers to bid for keywords that may be trademarks or linked to trademarks. Some say they are not eager to police trademarks because they risk losing thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a month on lost pay-per-click revenue.

Paid search is one of the fastest growing and most closely watched segments of the online advertising business. According to Jupiter Research, paid search will grow from $1.6 billion in sales in 2003 to $2.1 billion in 2004, and it will continue to grow at a compound annual rate of 20 percent through 2008.

In addition, more than half the total searches are for branded keywords such as Wells Fargo, according to comScore Networks, a market research company.

The search engine companies have long had ambiguous policies on trademark-related advertising. Most refuse to actively police infringements. Instead, they opt for a hands-off approach, acting only if there is a complaint from a trademark owner.

More than a year ago, Overture changed its policy and posted a trademark notice on its site, informing advertisers that it is their responsibility to respect the trademark rights of others.

“In cases in which an advertiser has bid on a term that may be the trademark of another, Overture allows the bids only if the advertiser presents content on its Web site that refers to the trademark … or uses the term in a generic or merely descriptive manner,” according to the policy.

It’s All About The Meta Tags

Meta tags are HTML code embedded on a Web page used to identify its content. Meta tags are powerful tools because they have a direct effect on the frequency with which many search engines will find a Web site. When a search engine finds a search term in a meta tag, it indexes the Web page for display in its search results.

In the early days of Internet search engines, Web page programmers influenced Web searches by spiking the meta tags with the same word over and over to improve their standing in search engine results. Most search engines have since been trained to largely ignore these repetitions.

But not every meta tag use of another company’s trademark is illegal. When the trademark is used only to describe the goods or services of a company or their geographic origin, it is permitted under trademark law as “fair use.” For example, if a site delivers content such as music from the Amazon region of South America, it may use the word “Amazon” in its meta tags. This use would not infringe the Amazon.com trademark because the term “Amazon” is being accurately used to describe the goods offered.

Unfortunately, there is no clear test for proving fair use, and even a merely descriptive use of a trademark in a meta tag may trigger a lawsuit. Legal experts say, “When in doubt about using a trademark in your meta tag, leave it out.”

The Resolution

Most agree this issue is going to take some time to be resolved.

“I think it’ll take a couple of years,” says Jeffrey Riffer, a partner at Jeffer Mangels Butler & Marmaro, a law firm in Los Angeles. Riffer was the lawyer for defendants Excite and Netscape when Playboy sued them for trademark infringement. Playboy prevailed in that case.

“There needs to be some appellate court rulings on this before it will settle down. We are still at the beginning. There was nothing like the Internet before, so the courts didn’t know how to deal with the issue. There was tension between what the search engines want to do and what the trademark holders want. But there are still more of the fights that will happen in the trial courts.”

Riffer says that when everything finally does settle down, he believes that search engines will be allowed to sell keyword advertising.

“It’s good public policy to allow advertisers to sell advertising to the audience that is most likely to be interested in that advertising,” he says. “It’s good for consumers, pro-competitive and the right application of trademark law. Under the law a trademark holder doesn’t have a monopoly on the trademark. They are only allowed to stop other companies when there is a likelihood of confusion.”

But what if things don’t shake out in favor of the search engines?

“The world will go on if things go the other way, but it’s bad public policy, and at that point the search engines should hire a lobbyist and go to congress,” Riffer says.

Barry Felder, a partner head at Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner, a New York law firm and Playboy’s counsel in the suit against Netscape and Excite, says he expects that traditional trademark analysis will be applied, but in the context of the Internet, over the next one to three years.

“I expect guidelines for both the search engines and the trademark holders,” Felder says. “They will both have to be familiar with and adopt the appropriate conduct. I don’t know that one party or the other will prevail. The analysis will turn on whether the use [of the trademark] is confusing.”

Attorney Ross says that absent congressional action, the earliest he expects guidance from the appellate courts is late 2005. “The problem is that in the meantime, businesses need to figure out how to operate in an uncertain environment,” Ross says. “And that is creating a mess.”

Lisa Picarille is the editor of Revenue.

The Color of Success

Color is often a forgotten factor in online design. Online merchants spend millions to hone their Web site designs, but they sometimes forget to research their color choices as well. That interferes with their attempt to build a brand relationship with their customers and also affects purchasing behavior.

Color invokes a physical reaction in the human brain. These reactions can perpetuate the mood or tone of your customer in a quick glance, leading to an association of your brand, products or service offerings. You’ll want to make sure that association is favorable.

Psychologically, color can have many different meanings for different cultures, age groups and gender. One of the biggest mistakes an online retailer can make is choosing a color without first knowing how it could be perceived by their target audience. So the first positive step in choosing the appropriate color is knowing exactly to whom you’re selling.

For example, the color white is often associated with wedding celebrations in Western societies like the US, but in Chinese cultures it signifies funerals. Men have been found to prefer bright colors, while women prefer softer colors. Remember, just because you like the color orange doesn’t mean your customer does.

Typically colors can be classified into three categories: warm, cool and neutral. Warm colors like red and yellow are often associated with power, creativity and optimism. Cool colors like blue and green are often associated with beauty and calmness. Neutral colors such as white and black are most popularly associated with good and evil. However, white can also be associated as innocent, and black as elegant.

Plan Ahead

When you’re building your brand online, think about what a color means before committing to it. The following is a reference list of primary colors, their typical association with online viewers, and their possible uses.

Blue is many people’s favorite color, and is associated with honesty.
Possible Use: Software.
Green is good to use if you want to symbolize growth or show your company’s power.
Possible Use: Finance.
Red is an aggressive and exciting color that gets your customers’ attention.
Possible Use: Hardware and automotive.
Black shows off power and elegance and works best for expensive or luxury items.
Possible Use: Luxury Automotive.
Orange provides a feeling of satisfaction to your viewer.
Possible Use: Online Content Provider.
Yellow works best to showcase feelings of warmth.
Possible Use: Kids’ Products.
Purple suggests sophistication and passion.
Possible Use: Jewelry.
White is elegant and clean.
Possible Use: Heavy Content Sites.

Using Color Effectively

Once you’ve done your due diligence and chosen the colors that best fit your target audience, you can begin to utilize those colors to enhance your clicks and your bottom line.

One of the best ways to use color is to draw the customer’s eye to a specific point of interest on your site. One way to do this is by creating contrasts between colors. Contrast can be used to separate points of information, allowing the viewer to easily distinguish the difference between all the information presented. Just be sure to choose colors that are complementary to each other.

For example, colors based on the same hues, like red and orange, often don’t work well against one another. Green and yellow are another example of colors that should be blended carefully, if at all.

Contrast is also important when displaying ads within your site design. Typically, one might think that you should create direct color contrast with an advertisement. However, in today’s online ad space, it pays to look less like an ad and more like regular content.

Build Your Brand

What color is a Coca-Cola can? Unless you are color blind, you know that it is red. You know it so well that you can picture the can in your head and even visualize the shade of red. Imagine you are standing 100 yards away looking at a fence with three soda cans sitting on it. There is a red can, a blue can and a green can. Without being able to read the logos on the can, you’d still be able to know that the red one is a Coke can, right?

Color is a powerful way to drive your brand identity into the minds of your customers. Done right, through consistency over time, your customers will begin to associate your color choice to your products and services. So choose wisely.

Most monitors today can handle millions of colors; therefore, adhering to the browser-safe palette of 216 colors is not completely necessary these days. Unless you’re a stickler for exact consistency, it’s not something about which you should worry too much.

However, that doesn’t mean you should turn your Web site into a rainbow of colors. First, choose your primary color, and then choose two to three complementary colors to use as accent within your site design. This set of colors will become your color palette. Stick to your palette to create a sense of consistency across your designs.

White space is one of the most important graphic elements of any design. It is defined as the space in your design that exists between page elements like headlines, blocks of type, ads, photos, etc.

Too little use of white space can make your Web site look crowded. Too much use of white space can separate and distance your message. Use white space to create a Web site that has “breathing room” for your messages, which in turn makes them more readable and ultimately more attractive.

JIM F. KUKRAL serves as brand manager and director of e-marketing for KowaBunga Technologies, which makes My Affiliate Program tracking software.