NEW YORK - There may be big-media success stories on the Net, but they certainly weren't making themselves heard at the Javits Center on Monday. While an industry that's about to hit US$1 billion in sales should sound sure of itself, the loudest messages delivered by publishers and editors appearing at a Web advertising seminar were at best cautiously hopeful, at worst defensive and uncertain.
"Some of the crying might be a little bit excessive. We're all still babies," said Ramona Ambrozic, the vice president of marketing for Wire Networks Inc., the producer of Women's Wire, Beatrice's Web Guide, and other Web sites targeted at women.
"I think that the people who use it sense that there's something greater that's coming later," said Terry McDonell, the editor of Men's Journal, on a panel of editors late in the day. Ambrozic and McDonell were both appearing at day one of a two-day Adweek Forum on Web marketing, held in conjunction with this week's Fall Internet World trade show at New York City's Jacob Javits Convention Center.
Ambrozic was part of a panel of Web producers building sites for women who were asked to address the current laments of online publishers. The three women and one man - who, besides Ambrozic, included representatives from Hearst's HomeArts, Condé Nast's CondéNet, and Thrive, a joint venture between Time Inc. and America Online - all echoed Ambrozic's points in their presentations.
"Let's get over this business of moaning and groaning about the state of the Web," said HomeArts general manager Kathryn Creech, who reminded the audience that earlier in the morning, Starwave vice president and Internet Advertising Bureau chairman Rich LeFurgy had said that the growth of the Web as a media market was faster than that of any medium in history.
"There is a business model out there, if we pay attention to that individual relationship [with the consumer], and don't sully that relationship," concluded Sarah Chubb, director of CondéNet.
The only thing worse than sullying the relationship with consumers, apparently, is confusing the hell out of them. That was the message delivered by Time Inc.'s Dan Okrent, who, as editor of new media, oversees Time's Pathfinder Network.
"The key mistake that we made was believing in this thing called Pathfinder," to the detriment of Time Inc.'s media brands, said Okrent, who appeared on the same panel with McDonell and representatives from the Warner Bros. and NBC.com Web sites. Okrent said the Pathfinder logo was slowly receding from the site. "It may in fact disappear in the next hour or so," he joked.
And Okrent insisted that Time Inc. had finally narrowed its focus. "The policy at Pathfinder used to be 'let a thousand flowers bloom,'" Okrent said. "The policy now is Four Fucking Flowers - FFF." Which includes, apparently, news, personal finance, and entertainment.
The most positive news of the day came from Forrester analyst Mary Modahl, who is absolutely bullish about the future of online marketing. Unfortunately, her confidence doesn't extend to the traditional brand advertising most comfortable to many publishers and marketers. She projected that brand advertising on the Web would remain flat in the near-term, and even faced a decline in 1999.
A modem running at "28.8 just doesn't present the kind of ambient, immersive experience that you need to build a brand," Modahl said. She cited other barriers to getting the really big name-brand advertisers selling goods like soap into traditional branding online, saying that the Net still has insufficient reach and a multiplicity of choices, both of which dissuade media buyers. Modahl is placing her bet for Web marketing success on direct marketing and direct sales, where banners and buttons bought under the cost-per-thousand formula familiar to the traditional media-advertising community will be used to develop what she labeled a "syndicated network" approach.
"Amazon.com created 15,000 points of sale in 15 months," Modahl said about the online bookseller. "This is the kind of disconnect in the Internet that I think it's important to stop and pay attention to. The number of points of sale is growing exponentially for companies that really get it."
