WSJ Page 1 article on Internet advertising...

**feels like a very old-school, 'gee, whiz companies are online again!' type article but has some positive signs (and data) for online ad spends that seem worth noting...

Once-Wary Industry Giants
Embrace Internet Advertising

Packaged-Goods Companies
Boost Online Spending;
Sites Retool Sales Pitches

Pepsi Employs a Floating Yoda

By KEVIN J. DELANEY
April 17, 2006; Page A1

In their pursuit of advertising dollars, Internet companies are winning some important converts: the consumer packaged-goods companies that sell everything from cookies and cola to skin cream and soap.

After years of cautiously experimenting with Web marketing, powerhouse advertisers like General Mills Inc. and Kraft Foods Inc. are cranking up online spending and increasing the range of brands they promote on the Web. General Mills, maker of Cheerios and Betty Crocker baking mixes, expects to nearly double online-ad spending in the current fiscal year. Kraft, home of Jell-O and Kool-Aid, plans to double its number of online-ad campaigns in 2006 and to increase the number of brands it advertises on the Internet by at least half.

The shift underlines the Internet's threat to traditional media such as television and print magazines. It suggests that the boom in Internet advertising that has already fueled rapid revenue growth in recent years at Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and other companies could continue as still other groups of more traditional advertisers step up online spending.

The packaged-goods companies say their customers are spending more time online and using the Web in new ways, such as watching TV shows and other video. "Our job is to invest in where consumers are engaging with media," says John Galloway, vice president of sports, media and interactive marketing at PepsiCo Inc.'s Pepsi-Cola North America unit. At his division, online spending is expected to rise to between 5% and 10% of the overall ad budget in 2006, from 1% five years ago.

Providers of consumer packaged goods accounted for more than 11% of the $145 billion in U.S. ad spending in 2005, according to research firm TNS Media Intelligence. But they spent just 1.6% of their ad dollars online last year, on average, compared with an overall average of 5.8% of total ad spending for U.S. advertisers, says TNS. These advertisers have been the most challenging targets for Internet companies, says Wenda Harris Millard, chief sales officer at Yahoo. That company has overcome some of their resistance by wielding new tools to show that Web ads can increase consumer spending.

U.S. consumers go to the Web for about 15% of the time they spend with all media, according to another research firm, Knowledge Networks Inc. in Menlo Park, Calif. Some Internet executives believe Web spending will echo the patterns set in earlier years with broadcast and cable TV, which both saw sharp growth in advertising once they reached a critical level of consumer adoption.

Others caution against extrapolating too much from recent jumps in online-ad spending by packaged-goods companies. Those companies generally avoid radical changes in the marketing techniques they have fine-tuned over decades, industry executives say. Wary of taking risks with their biggest money makers, managers of brands with big ad budgets have spent less aggressively online than their counterparts at smaller brands, and "it's unclear if and when this will change," says Jon Swallen, senior vice president for research at TNS.

So far, growth in online ad spending has been driven largely by industries like personal computers and financial services. These businesses can link consumers directly to sites where they can buy goods or services online. Spending by such companies helped drive online ad revenue up by about 30% to an estimated $12.5 billion last year from $9.6 billion in 2004, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

Packaged goods such as beer, toothpaste and paper towels, in contrast, tend not to be sold online. Partly for that reason, even during the Internet frenzy at the end of the 1990s, packaged-goods companies generally didn't spend much to advertise on the Web. The collapse of the online-advertising market in 2001 made marketing on the Internet seem even less compelling.

When online advertising did start to rebound, it was driven largely by search-related ads, not the display-type ads that typified the previous cycle of Internet marketing. Search ads, which appear when consumers enter related keywords into search engines, weren't an obvious fit for packaged-goods companies, because consumers generally don't search the Web for information on items like paper towels.

Another obstacle: It was still hard to prove that online ads led consumers to buy packaged goods offline in stores. The packaged goods companies for years had used complex systems for measuring sales boosts from advertising in traditional media, such as TV and print publications. Without the equivalent for the Internet, online ads were a much tougher sell.

By 2002, Yahoo realized it needed to overhaul its sales approach to packaged-goods companies. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company began developing a way to prove to potential advertisers that online ads contributed to offline sales.

Working with research firm ACNielsen, Yahoo in June 2002 began testing a service called Consumer Direct that allowed advertisers to see the impact of specific Internet ads on sales. ACNielsen, a unit of VNU NV, has approximately 125,000 U.S. families who participate in its Homescan service by recording items they bring home from the store. About 36,000 of them have agreed to let Yahoo monitor what they do on its site as well.

With the ACNielsen data, Yahoo can track when the display of an online ad leads to an offline purchase. It can also give advertisers other useful information, such as whether consumers previously had been heavy users of competing products.

Pepsi North America, one of the first Consumer Direct customers, has used the tracking service five times since 2002. Last year the company used Consumer Direct to monitor and target its "Call Upon Yoda" promotion with a Star Wars theme. In one ad, a green, pointy-eared Yoda character floated across Yahoo's home page to land in a small box near the upper right corner. Users who clicked on the ad box were taken to a Pepsi site, where they were given a chance to win a $100,000 prize.

Using Consumer Direct data, Pepsi was able to place its ads on areas of Yahoo's site most frequented by heavy buyers of 12-packs and 24-packs of soda, its target for the promotion. Pepsi concluded that sales to that group rose in double-digit percentages as a result of the ads, says Pepsi's Mr. Galloway.

Other Internet companies also began offering tracking services. Kraft was another early user of Consumer Direct, and later enrolled its Jell-O brand in a three-month study conducted with Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Internet unit in 2003 and 2004. The study showed about 8% higher purchases by consumers who had seen the online ads compared with those who hadn't.

"The watershed moment was definitely when you could say there was a positive sales increase," says Kathy Olvany-Riordan, Kraft's vice president of global digital and consumer relationship marketing.

Striking Contrast

For Internet executives, the contrast in customer interest is striking. After she arrived at Microsoft in 2001, "I couldn't get an appointment with a Johnson & Johnson, a Procter & Gamble," says Joanne Bradford, corporate vice president of global sales and marketing at Microsoft. Now, she says, "I'm battling to give them as much of my time as they want." Ms. Bradford says ad revenue from packaged-goods companies at MSN is currently more than double the level of a year earlier. She predicts growth will continue to surge.

Packaged-goods companies now spend the majority of their ad dollars on TV. But the rapid spread of home broadband access, to more than 60% of U.S. Internet users today, has made it easier for people to watch video programming online. Use of online video has exploded in the past six months -- from downloads of TV shows such as "The Office" through Apple's iTunes store to user-generated shorts on YouTube's site.

Kraft now devotes just a third of its ad budget to broadcast TV, down from roughly two-thirds five years ago. Kraft executives, like officials at other packaged-goods companies, declined to provide specific totals and breakdowns for ad spending. But they said Internet advertising has been a beneficiary of the shift away from TV.

So far, the increased spending online has had a limited effect on advertising budgets for other media. Spending on TV and radio by packaged-goods companies fell slightly last year from 2004, according to TNS.

Unilever, whose brands include Dove soap and Hellmann's mayonnaise, has cut its global TV budget to about 65% of total ad spending from about 85% in 2001, while shifting the balance to online and to other areas.

One of Europe's biggest packaged-goods companies, Unilever was among the few in its industry to move aggressively into Internet marketing in the late 1990s. But it had trouble detecting an impact on sales, and by 2001 it had slashed the Internet's share of its ad budget.

Unilever began ramping up online spending again after getting positive results for its Suave shampoo, using Yahoo's Consumer Direct service, and participating in other research that suggested online ads for Dove boosted offline sales.

Unilever planned to spend about 4% of its 2005 U.S. ad budget online, a Unilever marketing executive said last year, up from about 1% in 2001. The company now declines to comment on any such breakdown. Noreen Simmons, director of strategic media planning at Unilever's U.S. division, says she expects online-ad spending will grow further in 2006 from 2005.

"We all recognize our consumers are online and we all continue to share the sense that the effectiveness of a traditional 30-second television ad is continuing to erode," says Ms. Simmons. With online ads, "we see our own positive results."

Leading the Charge

Unilever's Axe brand, a range of personal-care products targeted at young men, is leading its online charge. The Axe division spends the majority of its ad dollars on the Internet -- a shift from 2002, when Unilever launched the Axe brand and spent the majority of its ad budget on television. "Ultimately it comes down to where the consumer is," says Kevin George, a Unilever general manager for deodorants.

Besides advertising on sites for young people such as Heavy.com and MySpace, Axe commissioned an online game centered on techniques for picking up women called "Mojo Master." One Axe ad on Heavy.com promoted a cable-TV program produced by Axe about a fictional secret society called The Order of the Serpentine. The large ad showed a young man in a bathrobe with ghost-like women clutching at his legs. It took consumers who clicked on it to a site for the show that heavily promotes Axe's Snake Peel shower scrub.

The explosion of online video is also prompting Anheuser-Busch Inc. to advertise more online. The company spends about 60% of its ad dollars on TV. But Tony Ponturo, its vice president for global media and sports marketing, believes much of consumer video viewing could shift to the Web.

Three years ago, Anheuser-Busch's online ads were essentially limited to the sites of sports it already sponsored, such as Nascar. At the urging of company president August Busch IV last year, marketing executives looked more seriously at the Web. Research they consulted showed that their target 21- to 34-year-old consumers spent about six hours a week online, compared with just 10 minutes a week a decade ago.

Now the maker of Budweiser beer advertises on more than 25 sites, from Yahoo and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL to niche sites including Flavorpill, an arts-and-culture site aimed at urban residents. Anheuser-Busch this summer is sponsoring World Cup soccer content, including video highlights, on Univision Communications Inc.'s site and signed on as a major sponsor for CBS SportsLine's fantasy football season later this year.

Online ads this year will account for about 5% of Anheuser-Busch's ad spending, double the portion in 2005, and Mr. Ponturo says it will rise again next year.

Write to Kevin J. Delaney at kevin.delaney@wsj.com¹

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