Re: What is advertising -- on the Internet?

Rob Raisch, The Internet Company (raisch@internet.com)
Tue, 3 May 1994 19:12:01 -0700 (PDT) 

Date: Tue, 3 May 1994 19:12:01 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Rob Raisch, The Internet Company" <raisch@internet.com>
Subject: Re: What is advertising -- on the Internet?
To: cni-modernization@cni.org
In-Reply-To: <9404037680.AA768006426@chronicle.page1.com>
Message-Id: <Pine.3.85.9405031833.A4277-0100000@hmmm>


Advertising is only one of the traditional components of marketing 
communications. The others are promotions, public relations and personal 
selling.  Each has its own set of merits and limitations.  

Traditionally, advertising is cheap, but it represents little direct
measurable connection between marketing dollars and increased sales. 
And on the other end of the scale, personal selling is atrociously 
expensive but shows measurable impact on the bottom line. (Marketers 
refer to this as 'affect.')

Marketing communications assumes four important events:

     the capture of attention,          (A)

     the generation of interest,        (I)

     the creation of desire             (D)

     and the evocation of an action.    (A)

In many ways, plain vanilla advertising is not and cannot be effective in 
the Internet universe due to limitations the current technology places on 
the effective distribution of rich content information.

If you look at the real technical demographic of the Internet community,
less than 2% of the current population have access to service of
sufficient capability and bandwidth to support rich content. 

Currently, the Internet lacks the end-to-end bandwidth to support the 
traditional methods marketers use to capture attention: rich content.
Without this attention, the "AIDA" event chain breaks down. This will 
continue to be a problem for quite some time to come.

(This is why The Internet Company -- and its projects -- have always
concentrated on low ascii text.   It may not be 'sexy' but it works.)

But traditional advertising assumes another, far more important 
characteristic: control of presentation.  

If the consumer can reap the value of any method used to attract
attention, without the requirement that they consume the solicitation
along with the "valuable content", there is little to recommend this
method to the advertiser. 

In the real world, the costs to the consumer to seperate the ads in a 
magazine from the articles are prohibitive.  Or, to seperate the 
commercials from the television show. This is why advertising works in 
traditional media.

Other ways must be developed to attract the consumer's attention.  
Providing valuable content along with the solicitation seems to be an 
effective model -- as is shown by The Electronic Newsstand, for example 
-- but even this model has its limitations.  (Rather than discuss our 
business plan on-line before we announce new projects, I will have to 
leave the rest of this issue to your imagination.)

But in a broader sense, any service built on the search and retrieval
tools of the Internet answers only the first meta problem in on-line
advertising.  Namely, how to provide the (already) attracted consumer 
with enough information about a product or service to allow them to 
make an informed purchasing descision. 

But this is only half of the puzzle.  The other half is how to make 
(potentially) interested consumers aware of the fact that we have 
valuable information available, ready to be considered.

And this is a distribution problem, not a retrieval problem.

Due to the (real) costs of distributing information on the global 
Internet -- and more importantly, who pays these costs -- we find that 
advertising in the traditional sense is not only ineffective, it is 
damaging to the advertiser. 

Within the next day or two, I'll show how The Internet Company has
answered (partially) this problem in a manner which is both acceptable 
to the Internet community as a whole, and also provides business with 
an opportunity to add direct measurable value back to the Internet -- 
and by doing so, participate in its community. 

--  </rr>  Rob Raisch, The Internet Company
           <raisch@internet.com>

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