Net ads: Have we arrived?

You open a web site and chances are that the most dynamic contents on

the page are the banner ads.

The phenomenal growth of the Internet across the globe has pushed it as

one of the most potential medium of reaching the targeted audience.

Consequently, advertising companies are increasingly looking at the Web as

one of the effective mediums for their clients.

In India, however, we are only at the beginning of the revolution. The

media planners may not be running over each other to catch ad space on the

web sites yet. But, they have started noticing it as one of the ways.

"Internet is in a nascent stage at the moment in India. There is a

need for the market to have complete awareness of the concept of web,’’

points out a media planner in a multi-national ad company.

Presently, the ad companies get to allot a very fractional amount of

the total ad budget from those clients who earmark the web as a specific

ad medium. And, these kinds of clients are generally restricted to

infotech companies, large multinationals or big financial institutions in

the country.

Many Indian companies that advertise on the Net today do not have a

separate budget earmarked for the Internet. Most of the time, a part of

the print budget gets transferred to the Net. It would take at least a

year to see a substantial change in the market to a level that would

inspire corporates to set aside a budget for web advertising and also

recommend the Net as a media when it comes to advertising.

The biggest advantage that the advertisers have in using the web to

promote their products is the possibility of collecting data on their

potential customers. They can not only identify the number of times their

banners where seen and the number of occasions the viewers sought for more

details, but also get personal information on such visitors.

However, one of the major reasons the web does not attract the

attention of advertisers presently is the lack of a standard benchmark to

rate the web sites. Web hosting companies use various parameters to

describe their success. Some of them stress on the number of page-views,

while others talk of hits. Some sites even mention the number of unique

visitors. If all web sites had a standard ballpark measure this confusion

could be avoided, giving the media planners more choice. Ideally they feel

that the number of unique visitors is what would make sense to them, with

profiles of focused visitor on the sites, along with other statistics such

as the hits and page views.

On the other hand, in print advertising, currently the most popular

mode, knowing the print run of a publication, one can access recognised

data on its readership and circulation, which helps reach out to a very

focused audience.

"Moreover, when it comes to marketing the space, the print medium

is far more aggressive as compared to its counterpart on the web.

Marketing of web space has to pick up to make it a success," pointed

out a media planner.

The demand-supply gap in Net ads is so large that except for the top

3-4 web sites, the smaller web sites (though, by way of page views or

unique visitors, they would be comparable to the mid-sized newspapers)

find it difficult to get the ad agencies agree to accept their offer.

Educating the market would help bring awareness about the advantages

that web has over other mediums such as print and TV. There are scores of

potential corporate clients who are waiting to sell their products to

niche customers that need to be tapped. One such community that is being

increasingly looked at is that of non-resident Indians. As the subscriber

base of Internet zooms up in the coming months and as the Net gets into

more and more drawing rooms of homes, advertising companies will be forced

to consider the most interactive medium for helping their clients reach

out to the potential customers.