The Hindu Business Line : Index for online ads efficacy in pipeline

THE online advertising bubble burst a few years ago but the market is "slowly starting to find its more natural level," says Dr Paul Prabhaker, Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Marketing at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Stuart Graduate School of Business, who visited Chennai recently.

The fault with the initial overvaluation of Internet advertising, he believes, lay with the classification of the medium. "Before Internet, the advertising industry only knew print and broadcast advertising. It didn't know how to classify Internet advertising, and classified it as print. So, measures that were used to evaluate print advertising, like cost per thousand readers, were used for Internet too."

Only now, people are starting to realise that the medium is a hybrid of broadcasting and print, says Dr Prabhaker, whose research interests include technology-enabled marketing and e-business strategies. "We are now learning how to use these different technologies as we go along."

In order to make online advertising more effective, Dr Prabhaker is developing an `index' that will indicate, "at a general level," how effective the medium is for different sectors. "There are different technologies but not all of them will be equally effective for all sectors."

For instance, not many would go online to check out food products but would like to find out about cars or other high-ticket items. A food products company, on the contrary, can use the online route to build a virtual community of customers.

The medium can be used to sell, build relationships or virtual communities. But "you have to know the nuances of the fit between the various technologies and your product rather than blindly jumping in and asking for this many banner ads, which will only be a waste of money."

According to Dr Prabhaker, the industry is already realising the limitations of some its formats; for instance, pop-ups, which Internet surfers are increasingly getting irritated with. "We are learning what will work and how much acceptance there will be. You have to be careful about what to put, and how to put it, in order to capture the interest of your customer."

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