• by Mark Naples , April 9, 2003

In early 1999, what seems an epoch ago, I left what I now regard as a cushy existence in Washington, DC, working as a consultant for AOL and some other then-seemingly cool companies for a full time gig at a well-financed start-up in New York. This start-up based much of its aggressive business model's projections on expectations for broadband penetration and online ad revenues moving forward, all the way to the distant future of... 2003, when Forrester and others were claiming that broadband penetration in the home would have doubled on itself at least three times to the robust range of 40 percent or maybe even more.

I'd forgotten all about that figure until I sat in the audience at the MFAA event a few weeks back and saw a graph on a PowerPoint slide, provided by Dynamic Logic and DoubleClick, claiming that Online ad revenues would more than double by 2007.

Mind you, this growth was depicted as in lock step with concomitant growth in online ad revenues as a percentage of the advertising industry whole. So, the number is to double, and the ratio is to double plus. The ratio is what we've all been focusing on these past couple of years. So, cool!

Here's my problem with it - I don't believe it. Ever since I began reading analyst reports for this industry, I've wondered out loud to the people producing the data just where the heck they get their projections. Have any of you reading this ever once read a projection of online ad dollars, advertisers, ad ratios, broadband penetration, or e-commerce dollars that does not imply a doubling within five years? I looked back over a few reports from the past 5-6 years and I could not find even one. Does any one of us believe this stuff anymore?

Here is the state of the Web Ad Market today. It's a struggle. Sure, the overall advertising market isn't so great. But, the reason the Web ad market has been stuck is that for years, the people selling Web ads told the people buying Web ads that they could use DM metrics to measure their effectiveness. So, we've been trapped in a self-imposed DM construct while trying to convince the people with the ad budgets that we really can assert Brands too!

Oh yeah - one more thing. Our medium, which on most sites is akin to reading a color magazine on a television monitor, has until recently featured mostly static banner ads on this TV magazine. So, to consumers, it features the worst of both worlds - the portability of TV and the graphical palette and static dimensions of a magazine. Think of putting Paint Box-generated ads on a TV commercial, and that - until recently - has been the norm on the Web. While the media construct has grown far more quickly than special interest media or cable TV, the revenue generator - the Ad Creative - has been stuck in the mud, despite owning far too ambitious and way misguided metrics against which to measure itself. Plus, it had to feed the VC beast after all those IPOs, but we all know the sad results from that part.

So, what's the point of this screed? Rich Media has already begun to change all this. Even the third party ad servers are serving more and more Rich Media ads - 30% and growing. Soon, this magazine on TV will have even more ads that look more like TV ads.

Additionally, some major brands are leveraging their TV commercials on the Web, like Fujifilm extending their "Greens" campaign, which Sharpe Partners made into such a success for them. This is memorable, effective advertising - not some banner or pop up that we move away from as we navigate to the next page.

If you're like me, you watch the commercials on TV at least as attentively as you watch the programs. That has never been true on the Web until very recently, so why would we think that marketing on the Web would grow, or even be taken all that seriously, for that matter?

Well, it's changing. This convergence that some of us have bleated about for so long may actually be upon us. I don't care about ad revenues doubling or any of that stuff, I just want our industry to produce something that people LIKE. Not those embarrassing pop-ups for X-10, or the profiling ad servers' ads that throw alternative vendors in my face when I'm about to buy something. (You know who you are.) Ours is a medium that still has a chance to do something far more elegant. Believe it or not, in spite of everything, it remains very early. Thanks to Rich Media, especially the preponderance of Flash, we're finally beginning to see some of this potential. So, instead of a quick moneymaking fix, or heroin-like dependence on specious growth projections, (which I always thought were produced to pimp the VC money anyway), let's focus on the product - great creative, well planned. Demand that your Rich Media service provider help you with making this work. Finally, they can. Lord knows that those of us still surviving in this industry deserve it.

Mark Naples is Managing Partner of