• by Masha Geller , August 9, 2001

I'm at the Jupiter show today, so as I walk the exhibit floor in hopes of finding something interesting enough to write about in tomorrow's column, here's an interesting tidbit from this morning.

The number of current Fortune 100 companies advertising online has grown from 67 to 81 since last year - a 21% increase, according to new Jupiter Media Metrix data. However, while Fortune 100 advertisers have increased in number, they have not been purchasing impressions at the same rate as the rest of the market. According to data from AdRelevance 3.0, Jupiter's enhanced online ad tracking service, Fortune 100 companies increased their number of impressions by only 14% during the first half of 2001 (January through June), compared with the 54% increase by the market as a whole.

Financial services and technology companies led Fortune 100 advertisers during the first half of 2001. Citigroup, Inc. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. purchased the most impressions among the Fortune 100 - 2.2 billion and 1.8 billion impressions, respectively. Dell Computer Corp. (1.7 billion) and Microsoft (1 billion) were among the technology companies in the top 10 of Fortune 100 online advertisers. Most of Dell's online ads were corporate brand ads, while only six million were for the DellHost product and just 331,000 were for the Enterprise SPD product. Conversely, Compaq Computer Corporation spread its one billion impressions among 16 different products during the first half of 2001.

Jupiter says that Fortune 100 advertisers exemplify the ubiquity of the online ad industry. According to AdRelevance 3.0 parent company hierarchy data, 92 of the current Fortune 100 companies have advertised 199 divisions, 204 brands and 1223 products online to date (since the third quarter of 2000). Additionally, the Fortune 100 preferred portal sites for their ads - the top 6 sites hosting Fortune 100 ads during the first half of 2001 were all portals.

"The good news is that more and more of the world's largest companies are advertising online," said Marc Ryan, director of media research for Jupiter Media Metrix. "Impressions purchased by Fortune 100 companies comprise 8% of the total market - a fairly significant number considering that AdRelevance 3.0 tracks over 41,000 advertisers. However, marketers might be a little disappointed that these large companies are not yet significantly increasing the volume of impressions they buy."