• by December 13, 2000

James Cramer's TheStreet.com column on Monday struck a dissonant cord even with this web optimist. "Here's a column that advertising agencies don't want you to read," he began. "Web advertising works, IF you want people to go to the Web. Television advertising does nothing for the Web."

Cramer went on to say that "radio works much better than television for the Web because people who listen to the radio -- other than in their cars -- are often on their computers. You have to turn your TV off to go to the computer, so the synergies there really suck. Radio works better than print, too, which also has been a big waste of dot-com dollars.

With all due respect, I vehemently disagree with almost every point. First of all, I'd like to think advertising clients deserve more respect than that. For the most part, if they're still in business, they know what they're doing.

Sure, if you gauge TV's effectiveness by last year's Super Bowl, TV is at a loss. But we know better than that. The abundance of cross-media research out there clearly shows that no one turns off their TV to go to the computer, and the synergies there are actually pretty impressive, considering the numbers of people who've followed some TV commercials' calls to action and visited a particular site. Incidentally, dot-coms seem to have learned for their mistakes - CBS says they've already sold 80% of Super Bowl spots and this year only 10% is going to dot-coms (last year it was almost half.)

And as for print, I'll grant Cramer that many [start-up] companies recently threw millions of [venture] dollars away on print ads [and elsewhere], but that's not because print doesn't work, it's because most of these companies didn't have a product worth advertising to begin with.

"You need Web advertising to generate traffic," Cramer wrote. Yes you do, but that's not enough. The web, grand as it is, doesn't yet have the market penetration to stand on its own, no matter what you hear. The most successful campaigns surround their target audience, and take advantage of each medium's unique benefits.