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To: Eric D. Moody who wrote (12176)	7/31/1998 2:55:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 164684

Ad Gamble - Here is an article about "branding" on the internet: upside.com <"The point of branding is to garner more share at the same price and features, offer [fewer] features for the same price or demand a premium price for like features," Holove explains. "The Web doesn't do that well--unless people click through. And people don't click through. So, the best way to get customers to your site is to create awareness [offline]." Holove is right, at least according to NetRatings Inc., a Web audience measurement firm in Milpitas, Calif. Based on measurements taken in mid-April, the average Web user clicks on fewer than one of the 89 banners he or she sees per week--a click rate of 0.7 percent. Nearly every Internet success story has to do with driving commerce, which has little to do with branding. The most congratulated companies are the direct sellers--Amazon.com Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Dell Computer Corp.--and there's not a brander among them. The closest is Amazon.com. It has done an admirable job fostering its image online as "Earth's Biggest Bookstore," but Amazon places most of its banners on a per-lead basis. So, while branding advocates secretly believe Amazon.com is proof of the power of the Net as a branding mechanism, they don't dare say so--because the company is getting away with free branding while paying on a cost-per-lead basis. >