• by December 5, 2001

Monday was a smorgasbord of activity for me. My day began with an informal breakfast with Newsweek/WashingtonPost.com discussing the road ahead. I then popped into the Javits Center for the IAB’s Annual Meeting, as well as the @d:tech Awards. I ended my day with a dinner hosted by eBay.

All in all, an eclectic day filled with publishers, agencies and clients voicing their visions and positing their predictions for the future.

I wanted to touch on a profound thought, which began in the morning and continued throughout the day. The real interesting thing about this idea was that before yesterday, I had never heard it expressed before, but yesterday it was voiced independently and unprompted at least three times by three different people representing three angles of the interactive spectrum.

We expend significant effort and energy on trying to understand why Interactive commands only 1% of the total media mix. We’ve tackled the GRP, TRP and audience-based approaches; we’ve looked at media consumption time; we’ve embraced countless brand studies that reflect positive impact on familiar brand metrics. These are all vital components of a bigger effort to win over the confidence of clients that are still dipping their toes in the interactive waters. But the answer might be even simpler than we think.

Agencies must be able to merchandise their work to their clients. A show reel, a reprint or a CD-Rom is nice to have, but nothing quite replaces the power of seeing the ad live in its final media environment.

In turn, clients want – and need – to be able to merchandise the work to their various constituencies – both internal: from superiors to subordinates across various departments, and external: to the channel, their suppliers, the press and the investment community.

There’s a certain psychological reassuring factor to being able to pick up a copy of the Wall Street Journal and see your full-page 4-color ad; there’s a distinct bragging element in tuning in to ER on a Thursday night and being able to turn around to your family and say, “that’s my ad.” Why then is it so difficult for us to do the same online?

Yesterday, I asked a client this question: “What’s it going to take to get you to spend more money online?” His unequivocal response: “show me my ads.”

The reality is that it’s extremely difficult to guarantee that your ad will appear at any given visit to a predetermined website. We usually need to hit the refresh or reload button a good few times, before being greeted with our creative. (Tip: Senior clients don’t have the time or patience to do this.) And then there’s the scenario where we find our ad, but it doesn’t load properly or we click on it and don’t end up where we thought we would.

The good news is that there are solutions out there. Unfortunately, they generally require the investment of larger sums of money in order to guarantee being seen at a given point on a schedule.

Fixed placement or positioning is one answer. The Tiffany button on the NYTimes website is a great example of not only making the most of the brand’s assets in a confining space, but - more importantly - assuming a degree of ownership of a prime piece of real estate.

Another attempt is through buying exclusive coverage over a given period. Budweiser’s sponsorship of “Happy Hour” on CBSMarketWatch is an example of this. Using multiple assets across MarketWatch’s property makes sense in terms of making an impression on both consumer and client audiences. MarketWatch cleverly combines their offerings - wallpaper, Superstitials, synchronized banners and background color-fades - in order to create a robust package for their advertisers. But again, this is a more expensive option for a “newbie” client with a limited budget.

A less expensive option might be to combine the two. By buying a fixed placement of a single unit across selected blocks of time, we could conceivably achieve the best of both worlds by getting somewhat closer to the Utopian, “one message from one advertiser to one consumer at one time,” as well as giving our clients a merchandising tool to take back to their constituents.

There are other options which could suffice such as a unique URL customized to clients with working demos of specific creative, or possibly a “launch + sustain” scenario, which would begin with exclusivity and later return to a normal rotation.

So, show them their ads and they might just show you the money…or at least a little bit more of it.

- Joseph Jaffe is Director of Interactive Media at TBWA\Chiat\Day in New York, where he works with clients including Kmart, ABSOLUT Vodka, New York City Public Schools, Embassy Suites and Sci-Fi. His primary focus is to highlight interactive's value and benefit in meeting his clients' integrated business and branding objectives.