• by Seana Mulcahy , April 9, 2007

Last week I was taking to someone who is new to online advertising and marketing. She was fluent in print advertising in both newspapers and magazines. I was explaining the difference between print lead times and online lead times for "close" dates. I think she was pleasantly surprised that with online advertising we need about five days to traffic, test and then flight creative versus sometimes months of time in print.

What we didn't talk about was the shelf life of some online environments. Depending on your business objectives, media plan, creative on hand et al, this could be bad or good.

I don't think you'd be surprised to find out that news gets old fast online. However, what I was amazed at was that online news really does have a shelf life -- 36 hours, as reported in TheNew York Times. The Times was quoting a research paper, "The Dynamics of Information Access on the Web," which appeared in the June, 2006 issue of Physical Review E, the journal of the American Physical Society.

The study also found that it takes about 36 hours for about half of the total readership to actually read the article in its entirety. According to The Times, "The physicist who led the research, Albert-László Barabási of the University of Notre Dame, said that the paper's conclusion should give journalists hope, even in the era of instant news. Dr. Barabási said that traditional ideas about the way people use the Internet would have led researchers to expect a much shorter half-life, more like two to four hours."

In the article Jennifer Sizemore, managing editor of the news portal MSNBC.com, was quoted as saying, "It's remarkable to watch how the readers find their way to what they're interested in....Sure, the top news story always gets a ton of traffic. But sometimes that second-to-last headline near the bottom of the page won't be far behind. And there are features that will draw strongly for a week or more. Even once they're no longer featured on the front, they are prominent throughout the site."

So how are sites tracking this? It seems a bit difficult. I have heard that most sites track headline data. Naturally they see clicks fatiguing after a short while. However, I often scan headlines and want to go back to the article later. More often that not, I can't seem to find where the article moved within a few short hours.

We all know that the online environment is a sound byte mentality. Those of us who plan media and marketing have that in the forefronts of our minds when developing strategies and creative concepts. We live a life knowing that we only have nanoseconds and pixels to appeal to users.

However, do online media professionals take this into consideration? I would assume these rules apply for non-news related content -- anything that appears front and center, then gets rotated into the site someplace. Is this good or bad for our ads to appear alongside? Unfortunately I think it depends. Does your plan call for new, fresh content? Do you even care?

Often the news can have a negative effect on our brands. I remember when I was at an agency back during 9/11. We had newspapers and business pubs as well as sites on our plan for one client, a B2B play. After the tragic terrorism hit we realized this company was slated to have a full page ad in The Wall Street Journal. The copy was to read, "Nothing personal, just business" -- then be tagged with the client's URL. To add insult to injury, the creative was a guy in a suit sitting in business class on a plane. Yikes. Granted, this was an extreme circumstance. However, media people need to realize that all advertising in one form or another can be negatively or positively affected by news changing day-to-day.

So my closing question to you would be, do you look at news as a critical component in your media plans? Post to the Spin blog and share your thoughts.