Interview: Carol Dukes, Director Of EMAP Online
Following the recent launch of EMAP’s new sales house, EMAP Internet Sales EMAP Creates Web Sales House, Newsline met Carol Dukes, director of EMAP Online, to discuss the issues surrounding advertising on the Internet.
As one would imagine, Dukes is extremely positive about the future of the Internet and its ability to survive as an advertising medium. She believes that the Web has features as a medium which provide a good environment in which to sell advertising.
Top of these is the fact that the Internet surfer is surfing and “doing nothing else”. “With radio and television distractions can occur, but with the Internet the user is totally involved with the medium. They are positively interacting with it.” Dukes also sees the physical proximity of the user with a computer screen as beneficial for advertising. This means, she believes, that “the quality of impacts is very high.” EMAP has also found the Internet particularly useful for running direct response campaigns: a recent e-mailing to users of the Whats On Stage site had a response rate of 10%, with user-forms, which users have to fill in to gain access, being particularly useful for gathering consumer data. This environment, together with the projected growth of Internet users, means that Dukes sees ad banner revenue increasing from £6m in 1996 to £80m by 2000.
A key feature of EMAP Internet Sales is an ad banner management system which will automatically log each time an advertisement is seen on a web-site. These figures, collected at an EMAP server, will then be audited by BPA to provide a guarantee for clients that a certain number of impacts have been achieved for each ad. Dukes is aware that many sites, particularly in the US, have become prone to “banner fatigue syndrome” whereby surfers have become so fed up with seeing the same ad in the same place that it has a negative effect on impacts. Dukes thinks she has this problem covered: as well as logging ad impacts, the banner management system will give each user an individual identity so that each time a web page is requested a different ad can be displayed.
Dukes is similarly unphased by the apparently esoteric nature of the web-sites which it has signed up to carry advertising: names such as Channel Cyberia, Yearling and UK Online, don’t immediately suggest young, upmarket, high earning consumers ready to go out and buy whatever the advertiser is selling. Yet Dukes believes these are the sites which dominate in terms of providing advertisers with the “tightly defined demographic” which is the Internet’s biggest selling-point: 25-35 year old males, AB, professional, well-educated and high earning. She believes there will also be the opportunity for even more defined targeting, with ads being sold via the content of the Website: sports equipment ads for example would be placed within sports-related sites.
While Dukes would not reveal who the advertisers involved with EMAP Internet Sales were, she said that the majority of advertisers would come from IT companies, financial services, motoring and even FMCG brand categories.
Despite the excitement about the Internet as an advertising medium, EMAP Internet Sales appears to be keeping its feet firmly on the ground. Dukes stresses throughout that the Internet is an extremely young medium about which everyone is still learning and makes no rash promises about what it can deliver. She dismisses, for example, surveys which suggest that Internet ad spend could reach £266.8m by 2001 as over-optimistic: “Look at commercial radio. It has had a very slow-burn growth and only now is radio spend beginning to take off.” Compared to the Internet, which has only been in the UK to a significant extent for a few years, commercial radio looks positively ancient.
Only in the long-run does Dukes see the Internet taking ad spend away from other media. A more realistic proposition at the moment is for the Net to be used in mixed media campaigns, though looking far ahead she sees direct-mail and outdoor losing out the most.
Agencies however remain more than sceptical about the medium. James Whitmore, media director at Young & Rubicam, is concerned about the lack of measurement and believes that this must be rectified if the Internet is to take off. In terms of the ad banner management system he said that it would need to be clear exactly what was being measured and how. In terms of banner ads generally he did not believe that they worked at all, saying that research in the States had found that they were not productive and were not the way to go forward. Whitmore believed classifieds would possibly be a better bet.
Frank Harrison, worldwide director of media information systems at Zenith Media, also expressed concern at the lack of reliable data for the Internet saying that “a robust, continuous, measurable Joint Industry Standard needs to be agreed before audience guarantee claims can be made.” It was similarly difficult to predict Internet ad spend in 1996 because of the amount of “unknown significant variables in the mix.” Like Dukes, he believes that the Internet is “still a baby medium”, though he says that a lot of site visits come from “curious/lost surfers and so the quality of the impact is lessened.”
http://www.internet-sales.com/
EMAP Internet Sales: 0171 388 2430