The show goes on...

N. Nagaraj

The recent slowdown in the new economy businesses has come as a boon to traditional businesses. For one thing, someone showed them the way. And for another, they are the main fighters left in the ring. No one else but members of their same ilk are quite so formidable now. And members of their own ilk... they know them, and they can all fight pretty decently; none of the cut-throat bloodshed that happened in the arena just a few months back.

The pundits are quiet. The consultants are doing their home work, and the gurus are preserving a magisterial silence that sends mixed signals -- that they expected it, and there was always bound to be some roadkill, but things will shape up, or, if you are a pessimist, that they did not have a clue as to what hit them except that some of the zeros after the bigger numbers have just vanished, and most of the zeros are happening in the stock prices.

Anyway, to business. That of online advertising. Property prices have been dropping as more and more real estate is getting freed up because of new companies going belly-up, and more and more real estate owners are just trying to survive, let alone making a killing. This is one of the best times for brick-and-mortar companies to start getting into the act, and make their presence felt, and try and get more business out of the Net than just losing business to it.

The first and major reason why they should do it now is that rates have been slashed to such an extent that it is very much possible to afford a good campaign on the Net, even for a small or medium-sized business. What if the rates go back up? For one thing, it is not likely to happen in the near future because of the competition as well as the fact that new new-economy companies cannot afford the same burn rate that they had the last time around.

Traditional advertisers also have the advantage of not having to try and build a brand through online advertising. Their physical presence and their brand building efforts offline will certainly place them ahead of pureplay competitors, if there are any left in their categories. Their brand as it is will have recall if only they make it apparent that they also have a Web window. Which leads us to the fact that brick-and-mortars need to concentrate their ad campaigns on promotion rather than branding.

In fact, like some brick-and-mortar companies in the US, Indian companies will do better if they set the right goals for their online advertising. One sports goods marketer in the US advertises for specific products in context. The ads do not lead to the storefront but to the page where a specific product can be bought. Another innovation that another retailer is trying out is to have text links in context rather than a banner or an interstitial.

This is also the right time for traditional businesses to make an impact for a totally incongruous reason. The slowdown has triggered a slew of innovations -- non-standard banners, rich media ads that are better produced, streaming media ads that are smoother because of better caching and buffering technologies, flash and shockwave productions that offer a more comprehensive and interactive experience, and finally, short films and Web casts. The best thing, however, about all these improvements and innovations is that they are also more effectively deployed now than ever before -- the effect of the realisation that context matters.

One typical old economy company - car maker BMW -- used short films for its advertising, and in an inspired move, created a new Web site (www.bmwfilms.com) which showcases BMW short films and also has snippets of chase sequences from films that feature BMW cars. The combination of value for money real estate and value for money creatives should offer a very tempting reason for traditional companies to go online with their showcases. The show must go on.

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