NEW SERVICE PROVIDES DATA ON INTERNET ADS
By Stuart Elliott For The NY Times
A monitoring service is being introduced that promises to provide information about advertising on Web sites in, well, Internet time.
The service, Leading Web Advertisers, is intended to deliver reports to subscribers that its founders say will capture and categorize ads on hundreds of sites, offering data on which marketers are running ads, when and where those ads appeared and what they looked like. The goal is to help bring accountability to the new media as ad spending in cyberspace continues its rapid growth.
"In this industry, where things change so quickly, the ability to find out about ads that ran just yesterday is very powerful," said Lee Nadler, president, chief executive and lead sherpa -- yes, that's his title -- at Digital Pulp Inc., a New York agency that creates online and off-line marketing campaigns for companies like Altavista, Doubleclick and 1800flowers.com.
"The service," Nadler said, "is especially relevant for the clients Digital Pulp handles -- dot-com companies that need up-to-the-moment information to stay ahead."
The principals of Leading Web Advertisers, which is being demonstrated to Madison Avenue as beta testing proceeds, have wide-ranging backgrounds in off-line media. One is Leon H. Liebman, a venture capital investor who was the founder and chief executive of Interactive Market Systems, a media and advertising data base and software company that was sold in 1983 to VNU N.V. (VNU is the parent of Competitive Media Reporting, the service that tracks ad spending, which was known until 1992 as Leading National Advertisers.)
"The Web is remarkable, the first truly global medium," said Liebman, who is chairman of Leading Web Advertisers. "When someone said there ought to be an L.N.A. for the Web, that hit a button."
Another principal is Michael Kubin, managing director in New York for Western Initiative Media, the media services unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies.
"There's a real need to get at this information," said Kubin, who is a director of Leading Web Advertisers, "and the technology has emerged to make it possible." The service has programmers in London and New Jersey and a data administration team in Montana.
"It was only a matter of time before someone plowed through the programming logistics so people could have access to these kinds of numbers at their desktops," said Paul Ahern, president and managing partner at DDB Digital in New York, the interactive unit of DDB Worldwide Communications Group, owned by Omnicom Group.
One feature that Ahern said he particularly appreciated about the service was the ability "for us to go on line for clients like Compaq or Amtrak or Mobil to see what competitors are doing, whether image ads, retail ads or price ads."
"You can infer the marketing strategies of your competitors," he added. "It's great."
The service is now tracking ads on 390 Web sites using what Liebman described as "the Willie Sutton model" after the famed crook who said he robbed banks because that was where the money was. The sites include ABC News, America Online, CBS, Cnet, CNNfn, E! Online, Etoys, Forbes, iVillage, the Internet Movie Data Base, Lycos, MSNBC, MTV Online, Motley Fool, Mr. Showbiz, Newsweek.com, Playboy Online, Red Herring, Sidewalk.com, The Sporting News, Switchboard, Ticketmaster, Travelocity and Yahoo.
"The way to get that information now is to have a summer intern or a college student go through a million sites," said Scott Schiller, senior vice president for advertising and sponsorship sales at Buena Vista Internet Group in New York, a unit of the Walt Disney Company. "L.W.A. provides a valuable service by delivering it in more timely fashion."
In a recent demonstration, Liebman and Kubin showed Leading Web Advertisers performing a variety of tasks. For instance, when asked for information on ads that ran for the first time the day before on the tracked sites, the service displayed a lengthy list that included AT&T Worldnet, Amazon.com and 800.com -- and presented miniature versions of each ad.
When asked to sort those new ads by the sites on which they appeared, the service displayed a list of new advertisers on Altavista that included Buy.com, Corbis, Furniture.com and Muzic Depot.
"That kind of information is likely to mean more revenue for Web publishers," Schiller said. "As a manager of a sales force, if you see that Procter & Gamble just broke a campaign on this site, you can make a call to ask for that business."
Liebman and Kubin said that the service would charge annual fees that would range from $10,000 for small subscribers to "six figures" for large ones. Among potential subscribers are agency media departments, media buying services, companies that sell ad space on the Internet and marketers.
Nadler at Digital Pulp said he was "a fan who is looking into subscribing." Ahern at DDB Digital said he was "definitely an interested possible subscriber." And Schiller at Buena Vista Interactive, soon to become part of the Go.com company combining Disney's Internet holdings, said he was "likely to sign."