for 1 May 2001. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Tim Cavanaugh
Special Guest Editor

Terry Colon
Art Director

Heather Havrilesky
Senior Editor

Joey Anuff
Publisher

As a former ad fella (not even my girlfriend knows), I'll tell you a secret: The most effective form of advertising (according to statistics) is direct mail. There, I said it. But your arguments are valid. The reason direct mail (better known as "the logger's delight") is considered the most effective form is that it is empirically provable. You send out X number of mailers, you get Y number of responses = your success percentage. There is no other medium that this kind of measurement is possible with. Budweiser learned the folly of trying to compare advertising exposure with effect on sales in the 60's. They noticed that when their advertising was lower, their sales went up. Taking a note from this, they decided to go an entire quarter without advertising. Lo and behold, their sales rose again. Thinking themselves geniuses for figuring out this elaborate shell game, they went for a period with no advertising at all. They consequently watched their market share get eaten up by Miller, which they have yet to recover fully. Advertising is a tricky business, and not for the faint of heart. If the rise of the internet has proven anything, it's that businesses were not only gullible enough to swallow the dot-conomy--but they're also gullible enough to ignore it's advantages based on a few meaningless demographic studies.

Cheers,

Gabriel
<GShelnutt@wolfcamera.com>

Thanks for the insight, Gabriel. The figure that gets thrown around for direct mail response always seems to be 2 percent, but it's never made clear whether that's an industry-wide figure or the response to a typical successful campaign. Either way, that's a 98 percent failure rate, but people keep using direct mail, because direct mail works. And banner ads work even when you don't click through, because you still see them and the brand name gets out there. So it's all good.

yr pal,

Vache

Dear La Vache Qui,

I've always maintained that we'll know the Web has arrived when we see "Drink Coca Cola" banner ads. In the bricks and mortar world where most of us still buy most of what we buy, advertising--print, billboard, radio, or on tv--serves the purpose of establishing and (especially) maintaining market presence and market share. There is no expectation for a magazine ad that potential customers will drop what they are doing and drive to the mall, so why should we expect the same of a banner ad? However, it IS hoped that the next time that consumer is in the mall, he or she will remember to buy Benetton or shop Victoria's Secret. Similarly, we should expect that a surfer confronted with a banner ad might click through but probably won't. But they should (must!) be trained to believe that eventually, when they are in the mood to read Plastic or Suck, that a banner ad will be there for them--and might just appear. In other words, the banner ad serves the purpose of telling Internet consumers that there is a Suck, and when the mood strikes, the one-in-two-hundredth chance of a hit is worth paying for the banner. Sales is always a numbers game anyway, so knowing that hit rates are low doesn't argue against the technique, it simply gives the business information about how many impressions to buy and what price is worth paying for those impressions.

Cold-calling is inherently intrusive and, as anyone who has ever sold knows, necessary. As a consumer I consider small banner ads the least intrusive form of cold-calling the Web offers. I click through sometimes--if the product is something interesting, or if the ad is clever enough. Most of the time I don't click, but so what? Most of the time I'm engaged in "directed" surfing. When I'm footloose and surfing, I might just click through.

Enjoyed the piece.

Rich
<richard.banks@cpa.state.tx.us>

An excellent summation, Richard. But you know, if we must live among the foolish, we must still try to please them. Every time you click through, an angel gets its wings.

But then there's always that internal debate. If you like a site but it has a really lame banner, should you click to reward the site, or are you really just rewarding the lame banner? Shouldn't we be encouraging artful banners, and discouraging bad ones? It's so confusing!

yr pal,

Vache

"lay like a flaming sack of poop on the doorstep of the future. " Brilliant similes like that are why I read Suck. Thanks. As for the rest of the article, I tend to agree. The problems of web advertising are the same as advertising anywhere, people learn to completely filter it out. As any veteran internet porn surfer knows, the reflexive ability to close a pop-up window in under 10 milliseconds is essential to enjoying the web experience (and preventing your task bar from being overrun by buttons declaring "hot,wet teens"). That same skill works for the blink 182 popup on excite thats been irritating the crap out of me for the last few weeks. I only saw it the first time because I was surprised excite had a porn popup but alas, it seems the popup is spreading. Then again, since porn is the only really profitable web enterprise, its surpising that its taken the other sites that long to copy their methods. I am sure you guys at "Suck" have never considered riding on the coattails of the more titillating sites out there.

Bradley Messmer
<bmessmer@nshs.edu>

Here's a secret: The powers at Automatic were telling us for a while that we were going to start running some kind of popup ad. I was actually looking forward to fielding the hate mail, but the whole project seems to have dissolved.

yr pal,

Vache

"What is the clickthrough rate for a billboard? For a radio jingle? How about a TV commercial? Or the one form of advertising that the banner most