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Article talks about why the click-through rate (CTR) is increasingly less meaningful as a metric of sales and marketing success and also talks about more useful metrics

Article discusses the disconnect between how e-commerce companies are currently approaching online branding and research that shows how users are discovering web sites

Di-Ann Eisnor is a master at persuading busy people to pay attention to digital brands. Her secret? If you want to move people to the virtual world, move your messages to the physical world.

Be honest with them: Brand building is different on the Web, where marketers must focus on users' heads, not their hearts.

Article heading states "Agencies develop sophisticated ways to gauge an ad's success at brand building, driving sales" but in fact it seems to conclude more that that is the goal than the reality. Along the way, it presents some interesting online ad issues however.

Websites bombard us with billions of banner ads. Avid surfers want to dodge the deluge. Arm both sides with shrewd software and you have the makings of a nasty little war.

Internet marketers made lots of big (and, in hindsight, dubious) promises about the power of the Web to give companies a uniquely powerful way to chart the performance of their ads. The folks at Avenue A aren't ready to give up on those promises -- even if lots of other people are.

"According to a recently published study by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, the Internet currently accounts for only about 1.5 percent of all marketing money spent by advertisers. The top six advertisers spend less than 1 percent of their budgets for online ads, whereas Americans spend approximately 12 percent of their media time online.

The big question is why. Looking for an answer, I hosted "What Do Traditional Advertisers Want When Buying Media Online?" last week, a panel discussion with representatives from Nabisco, Castrol North America, Yahoo!, and MediaVest. According to the panelists, here are some of those reasons"

Created and maintained by Steve McNamara, marketing professional, AdCracker.com was built in order to "help creative creatures create" marketing campaigns and advertising concepts. This light-hearted Website offers helpful exercises and techniques to help creative professionals start thinking outside of the box. The site contains four main sections. AdBasics provides seven short "how tos" on the basics of creating a marketing scheme including "How to write a creative brief," "How to position a company, product or service," and "How to create and characterize a brand." While these lessons are deeply simplified, they do give a basic overview of these concepts. AdCreative offers some fun brainstorming techniques as well as tips for performing successful presentations. AdNauseam is a catch-all for short and miscellaneous pieces related to advertizing. Finally, IdeaMachine offers a no-nonsense, fast lesson on creating memorable ad copy. [Scout Report Annotation]

Suddenly This Stealth Strategy Is Hot--but It's Still Fraught with Risk.

Trials and Tribulations of Humor in Advertising.

In direct marketing campaigns - Audience is essential … Offer is Everything … Creative is merely Compulsory.

Fine. Nevertheless, Copy is still King. Here's why: without good copy, your perfectly-targeted audience might never understand that wonderful offer of yours - or, even if they're suitably impressed, may not summon up the energy to do anything about it.

So whether you're penning an e-blast yourself, or reviewing your agency's draft of an upcoming self-mailer, it pays to know the difference between highly effective copy - the kind that commands high response rates - and the kind that just speeds your campaign's journey to the recycle bin.

Here are 8 ways to make sure the copy does its job...

It's Oct. 27, 1994. In an industrial section of San Francisco freshly baptized "Multimedia Gulch," year-old magazine start-up Wired is launching its first site, HotWired. Always on the bleeding edge, Wired had sold 14 advertisers on an exciting vision. But in its fervor to sell banners, HotWired promised advertisers clicks. In retrospect, that was a mistake.

Sure, people remember your ad. But do they know what it was for, or who it was by?

Note: eMarketer is a fee-based site

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Are online ads direct-response vehicles? Or, are they branding tools? Depending on the advertiser's objectives, both are true -- but not everyone involved sees it both ways. The research data is mixed, too.

Marketers repeat their message because up to a certain point, repeated exposures to the message can lead to favorable impressions of the brand. Professor Prashant Malaviya examines the amount and type of ad repetition that would lead to a desired impact level.

ICONOCAST takes a look at the problems facing marketers brought about by the new interactive online advertising options and dwindling response rates in all media.

Robert Bly explains how to persuade the engineer to take action. If you take the broader view, this is information about how you sell to the Analytic personality type - engineers generally possess strongly analytical personalities. So if you hope to persuade them, you can't ignore their needs, anymore than you can ignore the needs of your Amiables, Expressives and Assertives.

Article compares the growth of Internet advertising to its new-media predecessor, cable TV.

What draws you towards a particular make of footwear displayed on a store wall? What will be the sales impact of a new shelf display? Where in a shelf should you put your brand and how many facings should it have? To understand consumer decisions at the point of purchase or to measure the performance of POP marketing, Professor Pierre Chandon shows that the often-used memory measures are not very informative. He takes a close look at eye-tracking as a valuable way to measure POP marketing effectiveness.

This article reviews the various forms of online advertising available and some of the relevant research about the effectiveness of those formats. A good introduction and big-picture look at the field for marketers and site-owners alike.

In this interactive feature, Forbes.com looks at the world of direct-response TV ads. The question: Are they a good deal for advertisers? Ask Johnny Carson. His Carson Productions has sold some 2.5 million copies of its best of The Tonight Show videos, a number the author notes, "is comparable to the DVD/video sales for a hit Hollywood movie." Nearly two-thirds of all Americans report seeing infomercials, and more than 1,000 products a year are sold through this channel, according to this report. And infomercials aren't just for hawking crazy knives and foot soakers anymore. Established brands including Apple, Whirlpool, and Time-Life have mounted direct-response commercials. The report includes lists of the most successful infomercial products in 2002 (headed by the Bowflex Home Gym), and the best pitchmen (Need you ask? Ron Popeil). [HBS Working Knowledge Annotation]

According to many students of Direct Marketing, Claude Hopkins was ahead of his time. Jumpstart your DM learning curve by reading "Scientific Advertising," the classic tome penned by legendary ad man Claude Hopkins, who was born in 1866 and who worked for Lord & Thomas advertising agency, forerunner to today's Foote, Cone & Belding. The book has been reproduced in its entirety at this site for free.

Hopkins was an incredibly successful copywriter and strategist whose six-figure salary (enormous for that time) was the result of careful adherence to principles, fundamentals and ROI. In his quest to improve ROI, he was the first to formalize many classic advertising testing methods such as ad tracking, double blind headline testing and more. Dig into all 21 chapters of "Scientific Advertising" for free right here; they are as fresh as the day they were written eighty years ago.

PS - Hopkins is also the author of the autobiographical "My Life in Advertising", another "must-read" for DM students. [WDFM Annotation]

Here's a useful tool for marketers who want to get their legitimate email newsletters and sales campaigns through the blockades and filters that ISPs are using to stop s*pam.

S*pamCheck will run your email piece through its software and then will deliver a "s*pam score" and recommendations on how to decrease the odds of your email being filtered (by changing words, phrases or formatting). S*pamCheck is part of the SiteSell software suite. See the website for instructions on how to get a free S*pamCheck test run. [WDFM Annotation]

This very in-depth study, which includes information through Q4 2002, covers everything a marketer needs to know, from the continuing development of advertising technology (animated gifs, ubiquitous pop-ups and embedded advertising methodology) to the statistical analysis of media purchasing trends, and much more. Of special interest is the overall conclusion that online advertising is increasingly direct marketing (as opposed to branding) focused.

In addition, the report contains good information on email delivery rates and high failure-to-deliver statistics. NetZero rings in with a 27 percent non-delivery rate, Yahoo! has a 22 percent failure rate, and 18% of AOL email does not get through. Quite significant information as you contemplate your next email campaign. [WDFM Annotation]

Is the Internet a direct response medium or a branding/awareness medium?
This question, which not too far back into the past was used as a means of somewhat eruditely suggesting that, perhaps, there is more to Internet Advertising than clicks and immediate conversions, has now become part of a wider phenomenon of over-generalizing that has hindered progress in the Internet Advertising space over the last two to three years.

Few are quicker to point out this fact than Rudy Grahn, a key Analyst covering Internet Advertising, and specifically, online branding at Jupiter Media Metrix - one of the world's foremost independent Internet Research and Audience Measurement firms.

Over the last months, Jupiter Media Metrix has released important research findings authored by Grahn, concluding that Internet Advertising has significant branding effects, the majority of which go unmeasured by Internet advertisers.

In what follows, avant|marketer speaks to Rudy Grahn to get his thoughts on the direct response versus branding debate, the future of brand/awareness advertising in the online medium, whether this form of Internet Advertising will soon overtake the various forms of direct response marketing that have come to define Internet Advertising since its inception, and what advertisers need to do to better harness and understand the branding capabilities that the online medium offers.

Editor's Note: You can also download a complimentary report entitled "What Works In Internet Advertising" (I didn't so I don't know how good it is).

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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The man who lost $3 billion for Sony wants to make your brand the hero of his next film. And you thought TiVo was scary.

Chances are, you've implemented a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign strategy. That often means a position/price-based strategy on Overture and a price-based strategy on Google (perhaps a copy strategy, to keep CTR high). You concentrate on position and price to drive visibility and traffic. Though visibility and click volume are good, the strategy has flaws. Big flaws.

Price/position strategies ignore results and are static. Inefficiencies remain in campaigns. Opportunities slip away. An evolving strategy overcomes these inefficiencies and allows search engine marketers to seize opportunities.

Year after year the Yellow Pages are full of ineffective ads, costing the businesses which placed them thousands of dollars in lost profits. Follow these sure-fire ideas to dramatically increase the results your ad brings.

With over a century of practical experience, thorough testing and research, and the collective recommendation of some of the great names in advertising history behind it, you can take this approach to the bank. Long copy advertising works.