• by Masha Geller , October 28, 2002

Blame it on the extra hour of sleep over the weekend, but the online ad industry is a flurry of activity so far this week.

First, Dynamic Logic will be launching a new product today, which will allow advertisers, agencies and publishers to evaluate the branding effectiveness of integrated marketing campaigns that combine the Internet and offline advertising channels. It looks like the company plans to make the same type of cross media research they’ve been doing as part of IAB’s Cross Media Optimization Study available to the general advertising public. DL says the new product will help their clients evaluate the separate and combined effects of major advertising channels on a case by case basis, such as which media channel was most effective in increasing key metrics and which audiences were most influenced by the respective advertising channels. We’ll keep you posted, but I think this offering is definitely going to be warmly welcomed by the online ad community.

Second, eMarketer is scheduled to release their US Online Holiday Shopping report today, which will show that this will be a particularly difficult holiday season for US retailers because retail sales during the 2002 holiday season are expected to rise only 4% from the same period in 2001, making it the worst performing holiday shopping period in the past two years. The online retail sector, however, looks promising. eMarketer says that for the upcoming fourth quarter holiday shopping season, e-commerce expenditures will grow to approximately $13.0 billion, excluding travel sales, which represents an increase of 16% over fourth quarter 2001, and is roughly four times the rate by which overall retail sales are expected to grow from Q4 2001 to Q4 2002.

Third, the New York Times Company reported yesterday that for the month of September, traffic increased at their two major websites - NYTimes.com and boston.com. NYtimes.com continues to lead the news site category for time spent per user per month, recording 53.0 minutes in September as compared to 28.2 minutes for CNN.com, 23.4 minutes for MSNBC.com and 21.1 minutes for Yahoo! News. NYTimes.com's statistic of 53.0 minutes in September was a 37.3% increase from August's 38.6 minutes. Traffic to NYT’s Boston.com increased 10.3% in September.

There’s also increased activity on the football front (at the expense of baseball, it seems). comScore reported yesterday that between August 2002 and September 2002, visitors to nfl.com increased 40%, while visitors to mlb.com decreased 13%. And for the week ending Oct. 20, traffic to nfl.com was flat at 4.3 million, while traffic to mlb.com dropped 23% to 1.2 million. These findings are consistent with reports of disappointing television viewing of the Series.