Stephen Kim,the director of advertising sales research for Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, has been involved with studies involving brands such as Kraft Jell-O, Nestle Coffee-mate and Ford F150 trucks. He shared the following at the latest AD:TECH show in Chicago in July:

"We have been creating experimental designs where we look at test and control groups of folks who were exposed to the online advertising of Jell-O, Coffee-mate and the Ford F150 and control groups who never saw those campaigns and we were looking at the sales between the two," said Kim.

The study ran for three months ending in January and there was a lift in sales in all three cases, according to Kim. The Jell-O brand saw a lift of approximately 7.5% in volume sales, Coffee-mate's sales increased 10%, and 6% of the overall sales of the new Ford F150 truck could be attributed to online ad exposures, he said.

"What exactly is it about these campaigns that made them so successful? It's not all about the medium. It's still about creative. It's still about smart execution and the strategy behind the campaign. [But] we can conclusively say now that there is an offline sales impact for online advertising," Kim said.

Excerpted from MediaPost , 7/13/04

"Anybody who still thinks we're operating in an information economy, think again. In this Internet world, there is too much information and it's not getting any better," said Dave Hutchinson, president, Conversion Partners, said at AD:TECH.

"This fact is placing an escalating premium on consumer attention. Which, in turn, is making attention itself the new common currency for modern marketing," he said. in this noisy, hyper-competitive digital media landscape that we live in, attention is becoming the ultimate common currency for modern marketing. If you think of attention as a medium, it is the first medium where the consumer controls the inventory of this medium, not the Fortune 500 advertiser or the major media company or the ad agency," Hutchinson said.

David Tokheim, senior director of consumer intelligence for Brisbane, CA-based IGN/GameSpy, agreed the volume of the messages have become a problem, adding that consumers demand relevancy to the information being provided.

"If you want to reach our audience ... it is so important that you don't [tick] them off. And how do you not [tick] them off? Through relevance," Tokheim said.

"One of the programs we put together for the gaming companies and for the retailers was this framework from which they build their media plan. We call it the crescendo campaign. First you whisper, then you murmur, then you rap, then you preach then you scream. One of the problems we saw was everyone was screaming. All they wanted to do was scream [their message]," he said.

Excerpted from MediaPost , 7/14/04

Direct Newsline reported that study findings released by Tuscon, AZ-based Arial Software LLC indicate a computer hacker could easily destroy the e-mail database of most companies. That's because few companies "double-confirm" requests to be placed on e-mail lists.

The double-confirm practice involves sending an e-mail with a link attached, which must be clicked to confirm e-mail subscription requests. Such confirmations can prevent hackers vandalizing databases or from posting other e-mail names and addresses to a company's database -- to send out e-mail spam, according to Arial.

The software firm conducted an audit of 1,057 companies nationwide that offer e-mail services to subscribers. It found that only 7% double-confirm requests to add names to their to e-mail subscription lists.

EmailSherpa asdvised its readers in its July 27, 2004 issue of Return Path's conclusions from several studies it conducted on deliverability :

The supply of conventional paid search opportunities continues to expand from two principle sources: an expansion of online users; and a rise in the number of searches conducted by the average online user.

In May, U.S. online users conducted 1.2 billion search sessions, a 30 percent increase over May 2003. The primary driver in that increase was a 15 percent increase in the online universe between May 2003 and May 2004. However, the number of search sessions per user also grew 11 percent during the period. The net impact on search reach rose 2 percent.

Nielsen//NetRatings' Cassar, however, cautions that those rates of growth likely are not sustainable. "Because the vast majority of the online population already uses search and because the size of the online population will inevitably being to slow, future growth must come from growth in the frequency of searches per person," he advises.

Excerpted from MediaDailyNews, 7/20/04

Forget pay-per-click (PPC)--pay-for-performance (PFP) is all marketers want to hear about from their advertising and publishing partners these days. And it's not just search and contextual marketing, either: Networks like ValueClick, 24/7 Real Media, and Advertising.com represent the major players in an emerging phenomenon that covers nearly all online sales channels

MediaPost, 7/6/04

http://www.mediapost.com/dtls_dsp_news.cfm?newsId=258142