• by February 28, 2001

Never before have I wanted to be in two places at the same time more than this week. The Jupiter Media Forum is going on now in New York City while I'm cooling my heels in New Orleans, waiting for the AAAA's Media Conference to begin.

The AAAA show kicks off with a grand reception in a few hours (I'll certainly keep you posted), but the Jupiter show is already making headlines. A report released at the conference today says that online ads reached a record level of over 172 billion impressions during the fourth quarter of 2000 while top Web media companies stocked 28% of their sites with non- paid self-promotional ads.

Jupiter analysts assert that sites using too many house ads are promoting web clutter and are diluting their advertisers' messages at a time when they badly need to be proving a return on investment to those advertisers.

O. Burtch Drake, President and CEO of AAAA, said is best: "less clutter allows good advertising to get the exposure it deserves."

According to the Jupiter report, consumers will face an average of 950 marketing messages per day by 2005, and chances are that this clutter will seriously hurt Web publishers as pay-for-performance pricing increases.

Incidentally, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) is scheduled to release a report tomorrow that shows clutter levels decreased in most major TV day parts last year reversing a longtime upward trend in the amount of non-programming minutes on TV's broadcast networks. Some of the decreases were substantial, such as in network news, where clutter levels dropped for an average 18:53 minutes per hour in November 1999 to 15:28 minutes in 2000.

As positive as the above sounds, the AAAA still recommends advertisers continue to monitor TV programming, weighing clutter data carefully when making ad buying decisions.

Naturally, that goes for online media as well. Unfortunately, I doubt that web publishers will be compelled to do about the clutter problem unless the advertising community forces them to change their ways. So the next time you buy online ad space, remember that it's better to take your ads to a smaller, cleaner site where they'll have a better chance of being noticed, than to lose them in the clutter of a web giant.