This isn't to say that Net advertising doesn't hold considerable potential. Traditional marketers know they need to reach consumers online. But this impulse will develop much more slowly if online publishers continue to drag their feet on solving the problems that have left much Net advertising ineffective. It didn't, and the fact that Net advertising couldn't get past its own hype ultimately prevented many sites from concentrating on what did work. In the end, online marketing seems much more akin to direct marketing than the sort of brand building that marketers typically do on TV or in magazines.
Consumers seem to respond to narrowly targeted sales pitches and advice.
To succeed, online ads have to be useful. But figuring out how direct marketing works online is much harder than sticking up banner ads. It takes lots of trial and error on the parts of both Web site and advertiser. The Internet is moving so fast that people don't stop to analyze what they're doing,'' says Clark Wood, AutoTrader's vice-president for marketing. Few companies come close to AutoTrader when it comes to evaluating the impact of Net advertising.