Art of the Glom

You can’t get far in the course of a day without seeing or hearing some promotion for a new website that will change your life. Gritty TV commercials, smart radio spots, clever print ads, and striking billboards bombard the masses — and leave smaller Internet marketers wondering how to make such impressive waves. Still, riding the ripples of the big-bucks splash campaigns isn’t hard if you aren’t ashamed of a little good-natured mooching.

The Internet Glom

To master the art of the Internet-marketing glom, you need to develop a strategy based on someone else’s top-dollar expenditures. Basically, while these companies spend their dough broadcasting all over creation, you conveniently buy the comparatively cheap advertising space their own sites have to offer. Then you sit back and savor the increased exposure that placement on their sites will bring. You become, in essence, a web-marketing parasite, a fat and happy tick on a well-groomed IrishWolfhound.com.

There are of course some guidelines to successful glomming. You must choose your host animals wisely, beginning with their own marketing budget. It’s been estimated that between 40-60% of dot com dollars are now spent on marketing. Uncovering funding figures is not altogether hard these days either - it’s part and parcel of the regular 5:00pm news.

Need some examples of how this all works? Here’s a quick view of successful mooching in action:

Battle of the Portals

Who says chivalry is dead? These days, everyone wants to hold the door of the web open for you, as your personal portal of preference. To gain your bookmark, portal sites have gone to vast extremes, spending obscene amounts of cash to top your list. Disney-owned Go.com network is a great example.

While the Internet properties that make up the Go.com network are some highly visible and well-branded sites, such as ABCNews.com, ESPN.com and, of course, Disney.com, once a Web surfer enters the portal, the search vehicle he or she will likely be using to access the Web is another Disney property: Infoseek.

What this means is that when all those innocent visitors want to find something, they’re more than likely to type in their search terms right here, as opposed to going out to another search engine. These folks will then be viewing search query results along with lots of other advertising exposure, courtesy of Infoseek. Yet ad costs on Infoseek are relatively low, listing from $14 to $22 CPM, with minimum commitments as low as $1,500/month. Not too bad considering the Disney-esque exposure.

GoTo.com

Since summer of 1998, bid-for-ranking search engine GoTo.com has actively mega-marketed itself, spending multi-millions of dollars to gain exposure and traffic.

The payoff for all this rampant spending? Lots and lots of visitors. According to Media Metrix, as of November ‘99, GoTo.com ranked 20th among all sites, having received over 7 million unique visitors.

For those keen marketers who took up GoTo.com on any of its advertising opportunities — especially its bidding for pennies ranking system - congrats. You basked in a multi-million dollar campaign for next to nothing.

Buying It at Clearance

There’s no shame in bargain-hunting. Why pay top-dollar when even the brightest, boldest and most heavily promoted sites discount their ads? Besides, remnant advertising has existed in the bricks & mortar world for decades now.

Take AdOutlet.com for example. AdOutlet.com is a resource for ad inventory of all types — print, TV, radio, Internet, even transit — and part of their offering includes acting as a clearinghouse for unsold inventory. For smaller advertisers, such remnant space is a dream come true.

Remember last year’s Super Bowl advertising and the onslaught of web site hype? Well, one advertiser, Monster.com, who paid several millions of dollars for their ad time has subsequently sold ad space on AdOutlet.com for as little as $3.30/CPM. Other recognizable Web properties include MP3.com, Time.com, and CBS Sportsline.

The bottom line? Smaller advertisers need not despair. Suckle up to a big fish and you’ll find that no matter the size of your fins, you can get in on the commotion of the ocean.

© 1999 Hollis Thomases, Web Ad.vantage, Inc.

Hollis Thomases (mailto:hollis@webadvantage.net), a marketer and public speaker with over 13 years of experience, is president of Web Ad.vantage, Inc., (http://www.webadvantage.net) a creative Internet marketing, promotions and public relations firm specializing in strategy building and implementation. Call 410-297-9495 for more information, and sign up for free weekly marketing tips available by email at http://www.webadvantage.net/tip.asp.

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