Web Sites Reboot Ad Inventory

By: Kipp Cheng and Sarah J. Heim (Adweek) Despite having held back or pulled ads from their Web sites after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, execs at major Web portals and online news organizations said their losses will be much less than those of network TV.

"For the Internet, I don't believe the impact will be the same," said Jim Keplesky, vice president, advertising sales, ABC Internet Group. "Because once you give up an ad on TV, that 30-second spot is gone and can't come back. On the Internet, we are still experiencing significant increases in traffic, so we'll be able to make up that lost inventory."

Unlike the TV networks, which bumped commercials in order to deliver around-the-clock news coverage, Web sites do not schedule ads according to dayparts. Many sites, such as CNN.com, Yahoo!, and CBS MarketWatch.com, eliminated bandwidth-heavy banner ads or graphics on their home pages to alleviate online congestion, but were able to reroute existing inventory to pages deeper within their sites.

By Sept. 17, Web sites including NYTimes.com and Forbes.com, among others, began replacing prominent ad inventory on front and home pages with pro bono banners for relief organizations, such as the Red Cross and Salvation Army.

Keplesky said ABC Internet Group had a handful of postponements, including a request to delay a banner campaign from financial-services firm Morgan Stanley, but there were no outright cancellations on ABCNews.com or ABC.com.

The vast majority of online ads pulled were in categories directly affected by the attacks or featured sensitive copy or images, such as the New York skyline (as was the case with one ad for a credit-card company that was pulled). A United Airlines representative confirmed the airline had pulled its campaign from the MSN Network of sites, but declined further comment.

While Web publishing execs would not speculate on the amount of revenue lost, some admitted they are feeling the pinch.

"There is definitely a financial impact," said Dan Silmore, a CBS MarketWatch.com representative. "But we haven't yet quantified it."

Shawn Gold, president and chief strategy officer at eUniverse, a network of entertainment sites, noted most site ad representatives he spoke to said revenue was down 50% over the three days following the attacks. He added that eUniverse experienced a 38% decrease in ad bookings between Sept. 11 and last week, but declined to discuss specific numbers.

By some analysts' estimates, Web sites, such as major portals AOL.com, MSN, and Yahoo!, could potentially each lose $1-15 million in revenue. While the figure is small compared with the reported $200 million-plus that network TV lost during its commercial-free week, for cash-strapped Web properties, any loss in revenue could prove to be financially crippling.

Jim Nail, senior analyst at Forrester Research, said the differences between how TV and online advertising is delivered could prevent Web publishers from losing too much cash. "The typical online ad campaign is based on delivering a certain number of impressions over a period of time," he said. "So, you can lose a week and still show impressions over a shorter period."

Nail cautioned, however, that bombarding Web users with more ads simply because there is more traffic is not necessarily an effective strategy.

"It's basically increasing frequency against the audience in a shorter period of time," he said. "That achieves the publisher's objective, but I'm not sure that it really achieves the marketer's objectives."

Keplesky said he is confident that the increased frequency of ads will not be poorly received by the sites' visitors, especially since the company has tried to be sensitive to consumers' states of mind. According to Keplesky, creative for ads running on the ABC sites are now screened for content. For example, an insurance company's campaign was pulled because its copy was deemed "too hard."

Paul Maidment, editor of Forbes.com, said he personally performed a sweep of the entire site to ensure that there were no images or words that would be considered offensive or insensitive by site visitors.

Monitoring the content of banner ads, however, has proved to be more difficult, since banners are frequently delivered via third-party servers.

To some observers, pulling ads from sites exacerbated a declining trend in new online ads that was happening before the terrorist attack.

Denise Garcia, research director, media, at Gartner Group, said the number of new online ads decreased from 545 placed on Sept. 5 to a mere 184 on Sept. 17. Garcia said the stakes are especially high now, with companies angling to catch up in the soft ad market.

But some publishers are not discounting the chance of a bounceback. "It's too soon to tell what will happen," said Jodi Sternoff, associate publisher at e-zine Slate. "I think everyone is being thoughtful and cautious, but I do think that there's a sense that we need to get back to business as usual."