For digital evangelists who see the Web as a genuine alternative to television, this week's Jupiter Conference on online advertising offered a difficult pill to swallow. The message of Wednesday's keynote and opening panel was familiar enough: The online medium has some significant growing to do before it can compete with the broadcast world for advertising dollars.
More disturbing, though, was the ever-popular notion that the Web needs to follow the television model more closely, if it wants to attract the mainstream consumer brands.
Mark Kvamme, CEO of integrated marketing services firm CKS, set the tone in the opening keynote by boldly predicting, "The Internet will be just like television: There may be 60 or 70 main sites out there, but the audience ends up going to only six or seven on a regular basis." This concentration of traffic, Kvamme argued, will lead to a self-organized version of the traditional networks, where the top one or two sites in each category "end up attracting 80 to 90 percent of the marketing dollars." Both Kvamme and Jupiter chairman Gene DeRose said it would take 10 to 15 years for the Web to become a legitimate mass medium.
Most of the speakers were careful to deliver the obligatory hosannas to the "paradigm shift" introduced by the Web ("This is just the beginning!" Kvamme exclaimed at one moment), and the strange mix of media theory and salesmanship hung heavily over the packed auditorium. "At our company, we've always been reluctant to apply old models to a new medium," Nike's Geoffrey Frost reassured the crowd. Despite such lip service paid to the Web's revolutionary potential, the overall tone belied a deeper longing for the Web to get its act together and start behaving more like TV.
"With advertising on the broadcast networks, I can hit 98 percent of my men's market. I can't do that now on the Net," argued Dockers marketing director Heidi Oestrike. "I also can't create the complex associations with a banner ad that I can with our [televised] 'Nice Pants' campaign." Frost concurred: "The delivery of the Nike message requires more than just a banner."
AOL's Myer Berlow, the only member of the panel concerned with selling ads, countered the critiques of the nascent Web medium by offering America Online's proprietary network as a plausible alternative. "Every night on AOL there are 400,000 people logged on," Berlow said. "That's the size of many cable networks." And with an average income of US$64,000, "these people have a choice about what they can buy." Not so much choice, however, when it comes to sneaker companies; Berlow noted that AOL had a $2 million deal with Reebok to be the online service's exclusive shoe advertiser.
Berlow went on to take a few good-natured potshots at both the Web and the Jupiter Conference itself. Both, he hinted, could do with a little maturation. "Web sites are a waste of money if you don't have the audience," he said. Then, gesturing to the 500-odd industry insiders gathered to the morning's panel, he joked, "But we're not going to recognize this until the brands represented out there in the audience outnumber the stock analysts."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
