Previously the province of the rich and intellectual, the web is now a marketing melting pot. Reporting on the update of three years of gathering data from more than 350,000 phone interviews, Bob Jordan, cochairman of The Media Audit, says, “What we’re seeing in the latest research are the late arrivals...minority participation rising sharply ...senior citizens and homemakers joining the web audience at an impressive rate.” The Media Audit reports that households occupied by those over 50 increased their presence on the web by more than 51 percent in three years. Retirees alone increased 84 percent, with almost one-quarter …

In a recent magazine award competition, only one agency received two nominations for creating the Best Online Brand Building campaign for its clients. It wasn’t the big-name shops of Tribal DDB, Modem Media, or AGENCY.COM, each nominated once by Revolution magazine. It was Freestyle Interactive, named as a finalist for its work on Hewlett-Packard (in conjunction with Goodby Silverstein & Partners) and for Janus. If this wasn’t enough to put the agency on some radar screens, Freestyle was also on the shortlist for Agency of the Year and a finalist for three separate clients for Best Use of Rich Media …

I love to advertise on small niche sites. There’s something about an audience’s loyalty to a small, “underground” site that just can’t be found at the larger portals and high-traffic sites. There are also some fantastic deals to be had at smaller sites that depend less on ad revenue for their financial well-being. While I work primarily on the buying side, I’ve published more than my share of small websites. Many small publishers like myself started out with a content idea that eventually achieved a significant user base with little in the way of advertising. “Pet project” websites can …

With online advertising in retrenchment, online ad networks are suffering. Some have gone out of business; most have cut their rates and reduced the number of sites they represent. But many of the networks are responding to the situation in innovative ways, improving the way they serve ads and developing new lines of business that make them more than just banner-ad servers. “The biggest trend is the movement away from pure media to diversified revenue streams,” says Marissa Gluck, a Jupiter Media Metrix analyst. “They’re not just representing sites, but also doing database marketing, email marketing, and promotions. They’re …

Last month, I served as the official timekeeper during the Technology Shootout segment of the Rich Media Road Show presented by Emerging Interest and MediaPost Communications (the parent company of Media magazine). Sitting on stage in New York, Boston, and San Francisco afforded me a great perspective on the 15 companies who were given precisely seven minutes to present their company and rich media technology to the show attendees. The shootout had a Gladiator feel to it. If the audience liked what they were hearing and seeing at any time, they would respond by blowing whistles. Conversely, if they …

The sector ranges from entertainment powerhouses like MTV and Rolling Stone to music retailers and file-sharing sites. Music sites were some of the first to be developed online, promoting pop-single releases, CDs, posters, and an assortment of related products. Older demos also gravitate to music sites, but not with the fervor or regularity of teenagers and 20-somethings. But according to Autumn Martin, media buyer in the San Francisco office of Exile on 7th, older demos are “much more responsive,” and are more likely to transact. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau’s survey of online advertising, in the first …

The new 800-pound gorilla of the online jungle starts throwing its weight around with cross-media deals. The time: fourth quarter, 2000. The place: CNN offices in New York. The participants: executives from AOL Time Warner, some of its properties, two advertising agencies, and Nortel Networks, an AOLTW advertiser considering a larger buy for 2001. Joe Kyriakoza was in the room. A group account director at Beyond Interactive, a division of Grey Advertising that is Nortel’s online agency, he attended the meeting on behalf of his client. Nortel had been buying television advertising on CNN TechWatch and some online …

Shortly after DoubleClick completed its acquisition of @plan.inc, in February of this year, the company launched a new research division, Diameter. Combining web traffic tracking and analysis tools with the firm’s already extensive online advertising presence, DoubleClick plans to give advertisers targeted research that will substantially increase their ROI. Here’s how they are going to do it. By acquiring @plan.inc DoubleClick has inherited a powerful statistical analysis tool—@plan Advertising. @plan Advertising allows advertisers to strategically plan campaigns using specific predefined or customized markets. Advertisers can then “cross tab” their target audience with any other market in the @plan system. The …

In last month’s column, I wrote that less than 20 percent of the top 100 brands are using their own website to showcase their television creative. To me, this a missed opportunity to put their highly impactful, very creative branding messages in front of their exact target audience, often right before an opportunity to make a purchase. However, there are a handful of brands that in my opinion do use their websites as a new medium for TV spots. Here are a few of them. Volkswagen (www.vw.com) Here you’ll find 19 of their latest TV spots, quite likely the …

The banner-advertising model may soon be voted off the island. So what’s a buyer to do? Sponsor. When the host of Survivor offered up a tray of Doritos to contestants starving in the Australian Outback, that sponsorship paid off big time. Doritos is also one of the sponsors of the Survivor website, and in the online world, sponsorships are gaining an increasing share of total online ad revenue. According to the IAB, ad dollars spent on banners slipped from 54 percent of the total in second quarter 1999 to 46 percent in third quarter 2000. Along with interstitials and …