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Strategies & Market Trends : Market Gems:Stocks w/Strong Earnings and High Tech. Rank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: puborectalis who wrote (54050)	7/30/1999 2:50:00 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 120523

Consolidation in the Ad Biz(TFSM)....."The real money is in the e-commerce side of things and in the advertising and marketing of it." New media vs. old One thing is clear: There's lots of room for growth in Web advertising. It amounted to $2 billion last year -- less than 1 percent of total U.S. ad spending. Getting a bigger slice of that pie won't be easy, though. Many advertisers are wary about committing larger budgets to the Web. They see ad banners as a waste of money, since most Net surfers tend to just scroll down and ignore them. "I think you're going to see some companies saying, 'Let's drop out of advertising on the Web,' " predicted Lawrence York, who manages the $36 million WWW Internet Fund. York recently sold his DoubleClick position, which amounted to 10,000 shares, or about 2.5 percent of the fund's holdings. "It's not as bad as selling books or CDs," he said, "but everybody's chasing the same pie -- the online guys, the agencies." DoubleClick's response to that is to deliver on the promise of one-to-one marketing. To do that, it needs to get more data on the people visiting its sites. There's just one hitch: Most of the sites in the DoubleClick Network don't have any personal data for most of their users. No names, no addresses, no credit-card numbers. They just don't collect that kind of information because most offer their content for free. Ferraris and chrome trim A sports site might know that its users, on average, make a certain amount of money per year and have so many cars in the garage. But in most cases it doesn't know a thing about the midnight browser on the NASCAR page -- that he's named Mr. Brown, buys chrome trim for his Chevy pickup and earns $35,000 a year. Or that the fan reading the women's soccer page is named Mrs. White, adores tennis and drives a Ferrari. They can't know these things unless Mr. Brown or Mrs. White provides some information by making a purchase or filling out a registration form. And the vast majority of Internet users don't do either when they visit the typical news and information sites run by publishers. So DoubleClick's challenge is to get more people to volunteer personal data. With that they can link back to the Abacus database, which details the buying habits of more than 88 million American households. They can see if you've been buying boat gear from L.L. Bean. Or baby clothes from the Gap. The general strategy for getting this information is always the same: Offer a service that doesn't work without personal data. AltaVista, for example, will automatically find movie theaters near your house -- but only if you register with your home address. It'll also list your horoscope -- but only after you reveal your birth date. O'Connor said he's exploring the full range of these "opt in" programs. "What we want," he said, "is to give marketers more ways to influence people." He'll have plenty of competition. Last year, 24/7 Media teamed up with IntelliQuest Information Group (IQST: news, msgs), a provider of consumer profiles, to deliver targeted advertising. Now people who register for sites in the 24/7 network get personalized ads based on their IntelliQuest profiles. "We're not just selling banners," said 24/7's Friesel. "We're selling people." Look for 24/7 and DoubleClick to focus more of their attention on e-commerce ventures with the likes of Amazon.com (AMZN: news, msgs) and Dell Computer (DELL: news, msgs). These sites don't run ads. But they may be intrigued by the Abacus and IntelliQuest databases, which can describe their customers' buying behavior. DoubleClick aims to take this one step further and help Abacus shepherd catalog retailers to the Web. There'll also be more consolidation. "I think in the next few weeks you'll see some very surprising developments," said 24/7's Friesel. "The noise we make is good noise."