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I never expected that blatant commerical advertising would work on the Internet. The medium is much better suited for providing detailed information to people who want it, when they want it, and how they want it. Surprisingly, some of the much travelled on-ramp sites like Netscape are showing impressive results from "hyper-banner" advertising. I recently spoke with Kathleen Gilroy of Kathleen Gilroy Associates, a distance education company in Cambridge, Mass.. In exchange for sponsorship of an Internet training program, she got a hyperlinked "banner" on the Netscape site. The result was 500,000 hits on her Web site in the first month (http://www.kga.com/ ).
Well, if you learn anything from dealing with the Internet and human behavior there, it's that you've got to expect the unexpected and adjust quickly to change.
So is advertising "in" now? Is that the way to go?
I've heard people comparing hits or visits at a Web site to responses to a direct mail campaign. That seems far-fetched -- not the right ballpark, not the right order of magnitude in terms of predicting audience behavior.
The first-time visitor who clicks to your site by way of a hyper-banner does so on random impulse. You've generated some street traffic by making it easy for people to impulsively move in your direction from some other site -- a click costs the user little time and almost no effort -- little thinking is involved -- curiosity is enough.
When you buy an ad on television or in a newspaper, you are buying an opportunity to catch the attention of an established audience. When you buy a hyper-banner on the Internet, you buy an opportunity to induce people to come to your site and be (at least once) part of your audience. You have not yet begun to catch their attention.
A reminder and invitation to check a website (not a direct ad for a product or service) is a step or two removed from traditional advertising. It is audience acquisition for another program.
Once they "hit" your site, you have an opportunity to catch their interest, to provide them with useful information or an enjoyable experience or a discussion with people of like mind. You have earned a chance to give them good reason to come back again and again to your site. If, at that point, you simply shove a blatant ad in their face or ask them to fill out a long form before you let them see or do anything else, you could be throwing away that opportunity.
In other words, a hyper-banner is a "hit-vitation," an invitation to hit another site. And the success of this approach does not mean that blatant advertising is thriving on the Internet.
In the Hit-vitation business, you are in do-it-yourself mode. Your Web site is the equivalent of a publication or a broadcast station -- run by you. You need to build an audience -- by serving an audience -- before you can expect to get results. And raw hits -- randomly gleaned from pointers and paid-for banner links -- are not an audience, they are just an opportunity to build an audience.
Generating hits by way of hyperlink invitations is analogous to acquiring a list of prospects for one-time direct-mail use. These people have not yet even seen, much less read, an ad or marketing material, and the vast majority, once at your site, will do the equivalent of throwing your marketing material in the wastebasket. In other words, this is a step removed from direct mail responses, and marketers should set their expectations of results accordingly.
At this point in the evolution of commerce on the Internet, the experience of the user with a Web site is simply too complex to reduce to statistics. For the long term, success should be measured not by hits or visits but by some index of user loyalty -- how likely they are to retun again and again. For today, remember that if you pay for a banner/link, you are sending out invitations to anyone and everyone to click on over to your site and take a look. And what that's worth to you depends on what you have at your site -- how useful and compelling people find it.
I still believe that the most interesting opportunities on the Internet are likely to come from serving audiences rather than selling advertising.
In my ideal model, you provide a place where people can interact with one another about matters of common interest; you provide related free information and useful pointers; and once you have built an audience and interact with those people regularly, you begin to provide them with services and products which they need. The better you serve them, the more likely you are to be successful. And in this mode very small operations could be very profitable and very beneficial as well.
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