In the golden age of television, companies that wanted to make a major impact created what was called a “roadblock” — they advertised at the same precise time on all three networks to ensure that anyone watching television at that moment would have to watch their message.
Last year, Ford created a similar roadblock on the Internet to promote their best-selling F-150 pickup truck. They placed banner ads for 24 hours on the three most prominent portals: AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. The banners were seen by approximately 50 million Web surfers. Ford reported a 6 percent jump in sales over the campaign’s first three months. Ford’s marketing communications manager, Rick Stoddard said, “We’ve proved we can leverage the Web for the mass market.”
Advertisers everywhere are realizing that the Web’s most popular sites now reach huge audiences. Gary Stein of Jupiter Research told Business Week,1 “Now Internet ads are mainstream and part of every company’s media buy.”
Although it accounts for only 4.3 percent of advertising revenue, the Internet occupies 14 percent of U.S. media time. What’s more, advertisers are no longer content to settle for text ads on portals and search engines; they’re pulling out graphics, animation, and music to catch the customers’ eyes. Most telling is that while the overall ad business is growing at 7.7 percent a year, the Internet ad business is roaring along with 28.8 percent growth. One Internet marketing firm foresees advertising in this medium hitting $9.3 billion in 2004.
On-line ad revenue was at its peak in 2000, with just over $8 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, just before the Internet stock crash. The industry’s trade group has been keeping tabs since 1996. The revenues for 2003 approached that record with $7.27 billion.
Internet advertising may be having more impact than simply its growing numbers. Advertisers can measure an ad’s effectiveness by the number of hits, and they’re looking more carefully at other media for the same sort of reassurance. Perhaps to that end, they’re now aligning their newspaper and TV ads to Web campaigns.
In the auto industry, this can have a profound effect. Research shows that...
