Marketers are beginning to pay more attention to what time of day their ads run on the Internet. The situation hasn't quite reached the level of traditional TV with its many dayparts (prime time,
late night, etc.), but it's quickly changing from the days when advertisers viewed the Web as an "on demand" medium in which users looked at content and ads at their leisure and feared they would miss
certain people by narrowing their time frames. Now, with competition for prime spots driving up prices, that viewpoint is starting to change. "We can't afford to go out and buy everybody anymore,"
says David L. Smith, chief executive of Mediasmith Inc., an advertising agency in San Francisco. "We have to think about who are the right people to reach and what is the right time." Two examples of
marketers running time-specific ads are McDonald's Corp. and Xerox. McDonald's advertises breakfast meals in the morning hours on Yahoo's site, ESPN.com and elsewhere while Xerox runs copier ads on
sites like PCWorld.com during particular hours of the workday, seeking to reach technology managers. "Suddenly, it's all about optimization and making your budget more efficient," says Young-Bean
Song, a vice president at Atlas, a unit of online marketing firm aQuantive Inc.
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