Target Marketing -- What Makes People Click

Table of Contents

Introduction

When button-down, middle-of-the-road, take-no-risks P&G starts floating banners in Cyberspace, it's time for a serious look. That's what you'll find here. The descriptions, the definitions, the examples and the results. How to think about it, how to plan for it and how to excel at it.

The rules for Internet advertising are much the same as other forms of advertising and, in some ways, much, much different. They are not as strict or nearly as widely know as the rules for bridge or canasta, nor are they as arbitrary as the rules for Calvin Ball. There's a little more structure to the Internet advertising game than that, and it's starting to actually settle down just a bit.

Think of this book as the program. You'll get to know the players. You'll get a feel for the ups and downs of the action, the types of balls in play, the kinds of pads you should wear, and which teams are leading the field.

An entire industry is growing up around creating online ads, delivering them, measuring the results, and auditing the players. It's time to get a handle on what all the excitement is about.

If you don't normally place ads in Life magazine to promote your nuclear decontamination consulting services, you won't be buying banners on Yahoo!, either. But you do place the occasional ad in Nuclear News. So you should think about buying a banner on their Web site. You should think about sponsoring a section on the American Nuclear Society Web site.

Now that there are enough people on the Web to make advertising viable, it can create awareness, make impressions, supply details, drive store traffic, and generate pre-sold prospects.

The Web has more flexibility than any other medium. You can create a short-run, one-off, highly-targeted promotion. You can run a long-term, high-concept, wide-ranging branding program. You can sponsor Web programming with a totally exclusive, competition-tormenting, image-enhancing contract. Your only limits are your imagination and your budget.

This book can help.

Who is This Book For?

If you're a marketing or advertising executive, you'll find more of your colleagues, more of your staff and more of the media reps knocking on your door talking about buying banners. The time to learn is upon you.

If you are responsible for managing a campaign, rolling out a new product, shepherding a brand, or making a business unit successful, you need some ground-level intelligence about what is possible and what it takes to make Internet advertising work.

If you're a media rep, it's past time to figure out how to add the online arrow to your quiver. When clients start asking about a Web-based ad strategy, you have to have the answers at the ready. "I'll get back to you on that," simply doesn't cut it anymore.

If you plan on selling banner space on your Web site to pay the bills and feed the kids, you might want to read this book tonight. The majority of this tome is from the buyer's perspective and it serves you well in trying to discover, clinch, and keep advertising clients.

If you're like me and are fascinated by the possibilities, this book offers a look at a whole new world of advertising. It answers the questions about the activity, the viability, and the future of promotions on the World Wide Web.

With this book in hand, you'll be able to hold your own in a conversation with your peers, create a meaningful online advertising plan and see a little bit into the misty future of advertising. You'll be prepared. More important, you'll even know what questions to ask.