Guide to Web Marketing

Caslon's online guides web marketing

new and noteworthy - what's new
madison avenue on the Web - research by the industry about advertising online
industry groups - who's playing the games
direct marketing goes online - links to mailshot dot com
hardcopy - comments, irreverent and otherwise, on recent books
but is anybody watching - and more importantly, buying?

new and noteworthy

Transcripts from the 1999 FTC workshop on online profiling are now available.

madison avenue on the Web

One of the best sites for analysis of advertising on the Web is that developed by Barker & Groenne. It offers academic research and a select list of pointers to industry studies.

There are, perhaps surprisingly, relatively few readily accessible and authoritative studies of online advertising - although there's lots of hype in the general and specialist media. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), a non-profit US-based industry body, has a disappointing site: many of the links to academic or industry studies are dead. However it does offer the useful 88 page Online Advertising Effectiveness study, which considers 16,000 viewers of advertising on 12 major sites and is touted as the largest, most rigorous test of advertising effectiveness so far.

That report was devised by Millward Brown Interactive, which also produced the January 1999 Advertising Effectiveness Research: Wired Digital Rich Media Study, a somewhat self-serving but interesting document.

Admedia Org, an offshoot of Michigan State University, has produced a short Internet Advertising Research Guide. Among other sources CommerceNet, Ad Resource (an Internet.Com subsidiary) and eMarketer provide coverage of developments in the US - largely feeding off media releases. The invaluable Cyberatlas, albeit with the same feeding habits, should be on your list.

industry groups

The US Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) is the lobby group for the online advertisers. It's site contains background information, all very positive but - according to both government and consumer studies - inconsistent with practice, about online profiling technologies and other issues of government/community concern.

direct marketing goes online

The US Direct Marketing Association (DMA), the umbrella organisation you love to hate, has recently released the results of its latest Electronic Media Surveys, offering a fascinating insight into how direct marketers in North America are exploiting the Web. We recommend the online version of Advertising Week and Advertising Age.

Locally the Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA) has placed its direct marketing Merchant Code of Conduct online.

hardcopy

We won't waste your time with an in-depth listing of online marketing resources, online and in print. Instead, here's some recent reading.

We were impressed by Eric Marder's The Laws of Choice: Predicting Customer Behaviour (New York, Free Press 97), a detailed study by one of marketing's grand old men. The Laws examines consumer survey methodologies, marketing strategy evaluation, pricing and advertising. The book draws heavily on empirical studies and is 'statistics-rich', so be prepared to blow the cobwebs from your stats textbooks before you immerse yourself in his provocative and fascinating analysis.

From another perspective the much-hyped Permission Marketing (New York, Simon and Schuster 99) by Seth Grodin (Yahoo! DM Vice-Prez) explores online marketing, based on interaction with the consumer rather than the couch potato passively receiving (and frequently rejecting) broadcast information. Many of the approaches explored by Grodin appear in Personalization.Com, a 'personalisation' marketing site.

Tom Murphy's Web Rules: How the Internet is Changing the Way Consumers Make Choices (Chicago, Dearborn 00) is less engaging. It's a superficial, upbeat tour de horizon of bots and 'markets of one'. Its value lies in the interviews with the likes of Intel's Andy Grove, Mike Bloomberg, Yahoo's Jerry Yang, guru Paul Saffo, novelist Paul Erdman and financier Ann Winblad.

Being Direct (Random House, New York 1996), a richly anecdotal memoir by Lester Wunderman - the man behind the Columbia Record Club, LL Bean and American Express - might be dismissed were it not for figures suggesting that direct marketing accounts for 15% of retail sales in North America and that the idea behind Amazon.com is to build up the world's largest direct marketing database.

T.G. Lewis' The Friction-Free Economy (New York, HarperCollins 97) is a worth a glance. Guy Kawasaki's Rules For Revolutionaries (New York, HarperCollins 99), a self-described 'capitalist manifesto' from the Apple evangelist is recommended by living national treasure Ian Johnston and is a perfect read for your next trip by train or plane.

Patricia Seybold's Customers.com (New York, Times 98), noted elsewhere on this site, hammers home the point that you must be driven by your customers, not by your IT people or the turtlenecks. Regis McKenna's amiable Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never-Satisfied Customer (Harvard Business School Press, Boston 1997) offers insights into information systems and relationship-building online.

Michael J Wolf's The Entertainment Economy (New York, Times 99) makes a persuasive though often overstated case that we're all living in the 'entertainment' rather than the information economy: forget the entertainment and your consumer will click on to the next site.

A similar spin is provided by B Joseph Pine and James Gilmore in The Experience Economy (Boston, Harvard Business School Press 99) which mingles aphorisms about service with a vision of business as theatre: in marketing goods and services you'll succeed if you think of yourself as an actor in a great drama, with an ensemble and scenery to match - whether you're selling a cup of coffee or a public transport system. It's a message many bodies online would be wise to heed, although we warn against the experience of some sites whose designers assume you visit to swoon at the digital scenery rather engaging in a transaction.

David Lewis and Darren Bridger in The Soul of the New Consumer: Authenticity, What We Buy and Why in the New Economy (London, Nicholas Brealey, 00) argues that the 'killer app' is to be 'authentic'. Alas, authenticity means more than slapping on a gold 'authentic' label - like that found on their book - or issuing edicts that "buzz beats hype", "individual tastespace will triumph in the marketplace" and "segmentation is dead". We suspect that Lewis and mates have overindulged in the pop sociology of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (New York, Little Brown 00): a dash of chaos theory, a pinch of amorphous concepts such as 'stickiness', a few buzzwords such as 'maven' and anecdotes about selling shoes to yuppies don't offer an effective prescription for marketing online.

Among the recent wave of 'advertising online' books, often built on the premise that viewing a computer rather than tv screen somehow makes consumers immensely susceptible, you might want to look at Advertising on the Internet (New York, Wiley 99) by Robbin Zeff and Brad Aronson. Having a site - particularly a site that your market can find, that addresses its needs and that is integrated with a broader strategy through for example appropriate promotion offline - is a useful way to build the "community" that's a goal of many of the 'new economy' manuals highlighted in our Economy guide. However, it's clear that undifferentiated advertising such as banner ads are generally not effective - reflected in their disappearance from many sites - a realisation unsurprising to anyone who recognises that the Web is not substantially different from traditional print or electronic media.

Brand Building On The Internet (South Yarra, Hardie Grant 00) by Martin Lindstrom and Tim Andersen provides some interesting case studies, though their applicability is often uncertain and the broader picture sketched by the authors is somewhat fuzzy. We suggest that many people would get more value from a critical reading of some of the better 'branding' books, particularly in conjunction with studies such as the excellent The Business of Ecommerce (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 00) by Paul May and Global Electronic Commerce: Theory & Case Studies (Cambridge, MIT Press 99) by J Christopher Westland and Theodore Clark. Judy Davis' Guide to Web Marketing (London, Kogan Page 00) is thin and forgettable.

Unlike the pundits we're convinced that good old fashioned retailing will be alive and well next century because consumers like good old fashioned service and they like fun, something that few websites provide. Some pointers to the future of retailing, finance and online services are provided in our Economy guide.

but is anybody watching and buying?

Pointers to measurement of the Web and e-commerce projections (which are often ludicrously skew-whiff) are supplied in our Metrics guide.