@LARGE
By Scott Kirsner | May 2, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO -- Jarvis Coffin moves through the crowded aisles of
AdTech, an advertising trade show, like a union boss at the annual
picnic. He greets every other person by first name, clasping hands and
promising phone calls and e-mails; others wave at him from across the
crush.
Coffin is the chief executive and one of the founders of Burst Media
in Burlington, a broker of online advertising that has been around
since 1995. (The very first Web ad, a banner promoting AT&T, appeared
one year before that.) The company's arc, from instant ignition to
near flame-out to recent resurrection, has closely traced that of the
entire online advertising industry.
Now, thanks to Google's clever method of placing pithy and relevant
text ads next to your search results, and an array of flashy new ad
formats, advertisers are making the Net a serious part of their
marketing strategies. Online ad sales totaled $9.6 billion last year,
according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, and are expected to hit
$12.7 billion in 2004, based on estimates by the research firm
eMarketer. Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker, who gave a talk at
AdTech, observed that online advertising still represents only 3
percent of total US ad spending, calling the Internet 'the most
underutilized advertising medium that's out there.'
If 1994 to 2000 were the experimental days of online advertising, with
marketers pouring money in to see what worked, and 2001 to 2003 was an
interregnum where many dot-com companies vanished and Fortune 1000
companies stepped back to reevaluate their online strategies, then
2004 and 2005 represent a resurgence. Consumers are spending more time
on the Internet -- hours that tend to be stolen from television -- and
they're increasingly connected at high speed. Advertisers have
discovered formulas to make Internet advertising pay off, and in the
next five years, some of the same companies that developed
technologies for delivering and measuring Internet ads will sneak into
your TV set, to manage the ads that appear on your TiVo or through
your video-on-demand service.
http://www.boston.com/business/personaltech/articles/2005/05/02/online_ads_moving_beyond_pop_ups/
Monty Solomon (monty@roscom.com)