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The “gee-whiz” era
of Internet and World Wide Web marketing has passed. A new way for marketers
to reach clients that inspired awe just 18 months ago now has to withstand
the same scrutiny borne by more traditional media (print, television and
billboards). Just having a site on the World Wide Web isn’t enough.
Companies advertising their wares on the Web want to know that their
investment translates into profit. Web users want useful information that
applies to their particular situation. With these goals in mind, marketers
are developing technologies that allow companies to target the ads to
specific users.
“There are two
segments of companies that advertise on the Web: traditional advertisers —
people really interested in brand development — and direct marketers:” says
Kevin O’Connor, CEO of DoubleClick Inc., a company that manages advertising
banners that appear on the most-visited Web sites. DoubleClick’s software
enables each advertiser to target ads to specific demographic groups. It
also follows up and counts who clicks on the banner and who didn’t.
“About 30
percent of our traffic comes from outside the United States,”
O’Connor says of the DoubleClick network. “The Swedish Post Office buys ads
so that when Swedes come into the DoubleClick they see only Swedish ads. We
do the same thing for Japanese advertisers. We just took our first Israeli
and Czech ads. Czechs come in and they see ads in Czech. We had a German
software company that only wanted to reach U.S. Macintosh users, so it kind
of goes both ways.” Narrowing the focus to a one-to-one relationship is the
grail of this kind of marketing.
The DoubleClick
system works so well that O’Connor is offering direct-marketing clients a
service where they pay only when the ads get people to buy the product
advertised. In other words, if the surfer clicking on the direct marketer’s
banner doesn’t buy the product or service, then the marketer’s costs to
advertise are reduced.
Going local means
more than just targeting particular ads to people in a particular city or
town. The ads, whether banners or Web sites, have to resonate culturally.
Agencies that specialize in interactive advertising — CD-ROMs. Web sites or
banners — serve as a bridge, keeping an advertiser’s message consistent. but
tailoring its execution to local tastes and values.
Andreas Panayi
is opening up the Sao Paolo, Brazil, office of Poppe Tyson Interactive. The
company, with outlets in
Malaysia, Hong Kong
and London, has learned that local presence is crucial to the success of any
Internet advertising. “[Internet] usage varies within regions, it varies
around the globe and it varies between neighboring countries,” he says. “In
Europe, Germans are becoming sonic of the leading Internet users. On the
other side of the globe, you have Japan; as soon as Japan adopts a piece of
technology, they jump into it. The government of Malaysia
is putting a lot of money and a lot of effort into creating these new
multimedia corridors for businesses and homes that are being built with
fiber-optic cables. Same thing with China.”
The value of
keeping a brand profile consistent and sensitive to local preferences meant
an additional challenge for the J. Walter Thompson agency’s Peggi Peacock.
On her five-year tour of duty through Thailand, Hong Kong
and Ho Chi Minh City, she found that local Web developers could undercut her
developers’ prices. But the cheaper sites didn’t always carry the message
her clients wanted to send. “I think the whole thing of globalization is
going to be a lot more difficult than people think. What most of the
multinationals are doing is taking over the creative concept behind the
branding, the communication behind the design, helping with the design; and
then the actual design is being done by a third party. That tits in with the
movement of the entire industry away from being advertising agencies into
being brand communications companies.”
While the
Internet’s instantaneous communication may be highlighting as many
differences as similarities, some things Panayi says seem to be universal
truths — at least in the marketing business: “We held a global round table
not too long ago in New York where we invited clients and prospects to just
sit down and talk. These were the things that came out: the need for global
brand management but with a sensitivity to the local and regional market:
the need for finding ways to bring verifiable return-on-investment numbers
to the table and finding ways to reach the customers with relationship
marketing.” |
