The net result of Web ad campaigns? Whimsy and befuddlement.
by Matthew Aselton
A recent spot for Alta Vista opens with a chess master effortlessly routing a roomful of opponents. He moves quickly from table to table, mocking his competitors, barely pausing to think before each move. Suddenly, he sits down across from a black boy who, apparently, has stumped the master. The commercial trails into the tag "Smart is beautiful."
Such is the confounding state of Web advertising. Web companies, flush with cash but lacking any tangible products, are pouring money into cryptic ads in order to lure viewers to www.(insertcompanynamehere).com. Getting attention, not informing viewers, has become the priority for adolescent dot com companies—even if it means producing advertisements wrought with shock value and ill-conceived scenarios. Why? Because Internet startups which aspire to be "the next Amazon" have learned that name recognition is the linchpin to both the mass and stock markets.
Unfortunately, most Web startups haven't managed to develop creative concepts that even achieve the goal of generating name recognition. One notable exception is Outpost.com, a Web retailer of computer goods which staged an award-winning television advertising campaign based explicitly on nonsense. In one spot, "Outpost.com" was tattooed onto the foreheads of kindergartners; in another, gerbils were launched out of a cannon through the "O" in a giant Outpost.com sign. The end of each was tagged simply: "Buy computer stuff on-line." A bit abstract, to be sure. But each of the spots was memorable, and Outpost.com's raison d'tre was made suitably clear.
These spots from Outpost.com—as well as a handful of efforts from select dot coms like E*Trade—have been the exception to the rule. Most Web advertising has not been able to meet even the modest goal of distinguishing a company from its growing legion of competitors. The AltaVista spot may as well have finished "Ham is tasty" because, in the end, viewers have no idea what Alta Vista does.
Creatively, the trend is refreshing. After all, who really cares for "traditional" advertisements, with their hyphenated superlatives (white-brightening detergent and non-stick pans), and their failed talk-show host/actor endorsements (Arsenio Hall and Dennis Miller)? And who really wants to see fat pumped into pizza crusts or listen to people singing a paean to baby back ribs?
But beyond the flashes of creativity, Web startups seem to have misread the market. Their target demographic (that is, computer owners and Web users between the ages of 25 and 40) is intimately familiar with the Internet, and feels bored with the onslaught of indiscernible Web ads; everybody else is stupified by the flood of advertisements from seemingly identical Web sites. Many outside the 25 to 40 year-old computer-owning demographic believed the kindergartners and gerbils in Outpost.com's ads were, in fact, being hurt-the ads were heavily criticized and subsequently pulled.
Commercials are expensive to make and broadcast—the price for thirty seconds during January's Superbowl will cost two million dollars. Nevertheless, profitless Internet companies are scurrying to secure just one of these slots. Hopefully, by then, Web advertisers will have figured out a way to be captivating without confusion.
BOOKS:
In The New New Thing, we learn that Jim Clark is a bad bad man.
by A. Chekhonte
In his latest book, The New New Thing, Michael Lewis is clearly right about one thing: engineers make the world go round. If you've spent any time in Silicon Valley, you know that programmers are the quiet and weary champions of the Information Age. They imagine. They invent. And by force of their vision, they disrupt.
Few have disrupted with the same success as Jim Clark, a one-time Stanford professor, who founded some of Silicon Valley's most celebrated companies. Given his rise from the obscurity of academia to the highest echelons of technology wealth, Mr. Clark serves as the book's ambiguously heroic figure.
Mr. Lewis, an able storyteller, spends much of the book describing Mr. Clark's idiosyncracies, particularly by telling us a great deal about his highly computerized boat, Hyperion. With this vessel as the central narrative device of the book, we sail through Mr. Clark's professional achievements and through events which expose his troubling and enigmatic personality.
Mr. Clark's journey supports the notion that Silicon Valley is a place where vision and bravado can be handsomely rewarded. After creating Silicon Graphics, Mr. Clark proceeded to build two more billion-dollar companies, seemingly on a whim. Though it was never clear to anyone how his second effort, Netscape, would ultimately reach profitability, the company staged an IPO in August 1995 which fundamentally launched the Internet economy. Healtheon, an even more improbable venture started in 1996, would also go on to stage a massively successful IPO.
Start
Founders' Note
Dateline
Dispatches about the interaction
of culture and technology.
Through a lens
People use cameras to answer
a question.
Backlash
Killthedot.com
Translator
Software interprets the classics
Send-up
Satire and ridicule.
Features
Silicon Valley
The Enigmatic Craig McCaw
Finish
Fiction
"Cyber-sized"
History of...
the typewriter.
The Watch
Reviews and commentary
Wind-up
Physicist Carver Mead explains why innovation requires courage and luck.
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