Net companies go to extremes to be noticed

It isn't easy being heard over the roar of all those Internet companies vying for attention. Net companies are resorting to guerrilla ad tactics in the very real war to pull in customers, turn profits and satisfy investors. It goes way beyond traditional broadcast, print and outdoor ads. Instead, there's the "Yellow Snow" campaign that had company logos drawn in the snow with yellow-colored water. Or the Charitycounts.com campaign where 10,000 wallets were scattered on the streets of New York and San Francisco. Each wallet had a note inside reading: "If you were looking to get some free cash, shame on you. Redeem yourself by visiting Charitycounts.com." Watch video Only about 1 percent of people can recall 12 ads associated with a company, according to a survey by Active Research. With daily promotions such as stickers on fruit and skyscraper-sized billboards, people screen out much of what they see, causing dot-coms to force new color into the average marketing campaign. "The more outlandish (dot-coms) get, the more opportunity they get for a public relations event," said Michele Slack, an advertising analyst with research firm Jupiter Communications. Word of mouth is the most compelling reason for people to visit a Web site, according to a recent report from Jupiter, which found that most people pass information about a site to between four and six of their friends. The No. 2 reason is an endorsement in a newspaper or magazine. Net firms, most of which are losing money, spent nearly $4 billion offline in 1999, according to Jupiter Communications. During the holidays some Web companies spent nearly 70 percent of their revenues to advertise through traditional media, but the return on their investment was never truly realized. Despite the spending, many Net companies have yet to break through the ad noise and make an impression. "So much is being spent on advertising that it's getting so difficult to stand out above the crowd." Slack said. Some campaigns make their advertising dollars work directly for the potential customers. Carorder.com gave out 50,000 $3 metro cards for the New York subway and paid the tolls, 100 cars at a time, for all area bridges. Drivers going through the toll saw two people holding a banner that read: "Your commute brought to you by Carorder.com." Dealtime.com, a comparison shopping service, took its tag line, "Let us deal with it," to the streets of New York in what its marketing firm calls random acts of kindness. Dealtime bought New Yorkers rounds of drinks, gave gloves away during the coldest days and offered shuttle buses to shoppers during the height of the holiday season. "We need to be able to personify (an Internet company's) brand in the real world because it's inherently virtual," said Sam Ewen, president of Eisnor Interactive, which specializes in offline promotions for online companies. Clients have included Staples.com, CarOrder.com and About.com. "Everyone has the same last name in the dot-com world. To stand out, companies need to give people a real-world experience of their brand," he said. Others take a more skeptical view of this type of marketing. James Nail, an analyst with Forrester Research, refers to such promotions as "Silicon Valley attitude." It seems revolutionary, but it's not what it takes to build a business, Nail said. "If you can't measure its worth you can't justify it." Yahoo, one of the most popular Internet brands and one of the first to draw attention through nontraditional advertising, calls its "Yahoomobiles" a fun and friendly way to reinforce its brand, even though its value can't be measured. The company will paint any employee's cars with Yahoo's colors and logo. During the holidays Yahoo paid for shoppers' parking in downtown Chicago, San Francisco and New York. What's next? "We're going to try everything," said Luanne Calvert, who works in Yahoo's brand marketing division. Such marketing tactics generally have a much a higher cost, ranging between $50,000 to $1 million to $2 million. Large-scale campaigns can include posters, decorated buses, samples, spray paintings and stencils on sidewalks and random acts of kindness such as paying for people's commutes. But it isn't always best to be so creative. "Just because it's possible doesn't make it a good idea--it can be seen as a shameless, gratuitous way to grab attention," said George Chalekian, an ad agency veteran and creative director for Zentropy Partners, an interactive agency in San Francisco. "If you're a health care provider you don't want to stick a plaque on a roller coaster." But Chalekian says these types of promotions are on the rise: "Anything is fair game when it comes to advertising, if you can justify it."