To: Josh Hartmann 
Cc: sjvn@access.digex.net, online-news@marketplace.com
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On Thu, 4 May 1995, Josh Hartmann wrote:

[...]

> The way advertising is (or at least should be) sold is by the number of
> times the advertiser's button gets downloaded. So if the button is called
> "ad.gif" then that image shows up 50,000 times in the logs, then that's how
> many people saw that ad.

Unless 1,000 people saw it 50 times each on average.  I assume the logs 
are being studied very closely to cover repeated hits from the same 
sources which are not cached?  If not, your numbers may be farther off 
than you imagine, in both directions at once.
 
> So.... if "ad.gif" is in the cache on a proxy, then fewer hits are reported.

True enough.  Possibly they'll even cancel one another out; but I'll bet 
no one really knows.
 
> Then in addition to that, if the button is hot to AT&T's web site, the
> number of times that button is pressed can be logged through a redirection
> program and should result in an additional charge.

>From a marketing/advertising perspective, pure knowledge of the number of 
times an ad has been seen, without doing even enough qualification to 
determine whether they are different people or deeper exposure of the 
same people, much less any real demographic research on who those people 
are, is bound to be unacceptable to a large number of advertisers.

I'm not trying to demean Josh's point; only to suggest that I think a 
more creative and researched approach will have to be taken before 
companies begin to use the net for advertising in more than a token way.
 
> >Recall also that
> >caching has always been with us, it's just more noticeable now with
> >the arrival of the big three. What does all this mean? It means that
> >simple translations from hit numbers to circulation figures have always
> >been unreliable and that they're only going to get more so as caching
> >becomes more prevalent.
> 
> This is a very good point.

Absolutely.

I think the crux has more to do with how companies use their presence on 
the Internet to enhance customer loyalty and customer service.  It may be 
purely my own viewpoint, but I strongly believe that pure advertising on 
the net is not now, and may never be, a comparatively effective way of 
marketing; and certainly will never be compared to the same saturation 
based on a well-designed website.


Jay Linden                                           Phone: (416) 510-8948
Toronto, Canada                                  Fax/Modem: (416) 510-8949
Net Presence/Marketing/Netsurfing        email: jjlinden@gold.interlog.com
     

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To: R Ballard