Paid Links Are Easy, Cross-Media Still a Hard Sell

By: Carl Sullivan Two forms of online advertising -- one very hot today, the other a little cold -- were central in online publishers' minds Wednesday at the Interactive Media Conference & Trade Show sponsored by E&P and Mediaweek magazines.

Paid links, which have accounted for much of the growth in online advertising revenues, will remain hot, according to Patrick Keane, head of advertising sales strategy for Google, one of the leaders in this space. He said that while only 5% of Web pages are search pages, consumers actually are making buying decisions just about everywhere on the Web -- as they randomly surf, read news, or conduct research. "We want to help publishers get a piece of that," said Keane, referring to Google's ongoing contextual ad partnerships with publishers.

Washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Douglas Feaver asked Keane about inappropriate ads running alongside sensitive news stories, such as ads for San Diego real estate running with a news story about the terrible wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes there, or a personals ad that popped up next to a CNN.com story about rape. Keane responded that Google doesn't provide the ads on CNN's Web site, but added that his company was constantly working to improve its linguistic technology to prevent such unfortunate juxtapositions from occurring. He also encouraged editors to immediately call their Google service reps when they spot such incidents.

With most of the conference attendees being from local media sites, many are concerned about Google's plans for local search services. Over time, the company is starting to implement more campaigns at the local levels -- by ZIP codes and designated market areas (DMAs), Keane confirmed. Google is trying to educate its users that they can enter "10003 pizza" in Google to find pizza places in New York's East Village, for example.

How can newspapers compete with the search juggernaut on the local level? Neil Budde, an industry consultant and former publisher of The Wall Street Journal Online, said local papers are looking for ways to build more robust search engines that will incorporate all of their content, including editorial, advertising, and directories. A comprehensive search that would pull results from all of publishers' considerable local resources would be hard to beat, he suggested. Currently, the search functions on many local sites only search the archives, or aren't well integrated with all of the site's content.

The Cross-Media Dream

The less sexy advertising approach discussed throughout the day Wednesday was cross-media. As this audience has heard for years, the reality of cross-platform selling is that it's harder to do than you could imagine, said Nick Nyhan, CEO of Dynamic Logic, a marketing research firm in New York. Cross selling is a lot like sex in 6th grade, added Joseph Jaffe, a marketing consultant: Everybody talks about it, but nobody actually does it.

Several speakers encouraged the audience to focus advertisers on the overall advertising packages and the impact of campaigns. "Don't get into the commodity game" of selling on click-throughs or other rigid performance metrics, Nyhan said. "We're not in the 'click business,'" added closing keynote speaker John Skipper, executive vice president at ESPN. He said his job is to attract audiences with quality content; it's the advertisers' job to make their marketing messages impactful.

Incidentally, ESPN.com hasn't bought into the notion of targeted advertising (another hot topic at this conference), preferring the mass media approach of blanketing all users with the same ad. In the newspaper business, registration is becoming almost an industry norm, as publishers enhance their ad-targeting programs.

On Tuesday, several speakers warned that the pop-up ad was dead. ESPN.com has gone a step further, killing all the banners and button ads on its site long ago. Skipper said both formats are largely ignored by consumers, so he's opted for the larger sizes growing in popularity across the Internet.