Internet Public Relations & Advertising in 2001-2002  

To represent you productively, I have to gain attention from 

media by providing them with newsworthy material. My ability to do 

that successfully, impact upon your corporate earnings.

I have to have a  creditable set of principles and tools to 

accomplish that. Here they are.  

The Internet has given birth to a new kind of marketing

It has introduced a media  which has replaced "cost per 1000 viewers" 

or "copies in circulation" with unlimited circulation. It has 

replaced monthly or daily dates on newspapers and magazines with 

perpetually in  circulation copies/editions. Yesterday's space in a

newspaper is worthless today. Yesterday's space on

the URL of a web site is worth more than it was

yesterday. Conventional advertising seeks the

customer. E-commerce customers seek the product.

Telemarketing is replaced with reverse

Telemarketing. Green cards are replaced by

telecommuting off-site workers, as immigration

becomes irrelevant. Middlemen, intermediaries,

brokers, distributors, importers, agents,

manufacturers representatives, and wholesalers are

becoming expendable and perhaps superfluous or

unaffordable. 

Yet some still claim that the

Internet does not have uniqueness in the sense of

permitting marketing strategies or tools that had

never before been used. The Internet is a medium

vastly misunderstood, particularly by "Techies" and

advertising executives, where people still imagine

a domain name is important, or search engine

ranking has an effect upon bottom line. Neither is

true. The greatest waste of energy is the belief

that email "spam" is similar to postage free direct

mail and desirable. Spam is a total waste of energy

and time and very harmful to good will. Spam makes

no one any money except those selling the email

address lists. Banners also are destined to

disappear soon, as users experience they are

useless and that click rates" are irrelevant to the

"bottom line". The same can be said for affiliate

marketing, partnerships, associates, affiliates 

banner exchange, user tracking,

'cookies' and of course "buying presence" which all

have particular appeal to the advertising executive

looking for a larger vocabulary. Some still think

the new cliche inventions have value, referring to

mass customization, the targeting of large numbers

of (potential or actual) customers in a one-to-one

fashion, with individualized offers, prices,

messages, distribution channels etc. as if they had

demonstrated bottom line effect. Or they speak of

auction sites, where prices are, in the

economically most efficient way, matched to

consumers' willingness to buy, as if consumers

determined pricing. Or they mention quicker, easier

and more cost-effective distribution of data,

ideas, books, music and other immaterial products

on the net, facilitated by Internet payment

systems, when that mirage is what is bankrupting

Amazon.com .  A number of billions are being

transferred from one owner to another without any

economic benefit to anyone but the recipient. All

of these toys of the "Techies" including  Fireworks, Cold Fusion,

Windows NT, Adobe Photoshop, SQL server, ASP,

LiveWire, Broad Vision, Visual Studio, Oracle,

cgi-bin files, Java Script, database driven

website, Access, SQL server, QuarkXPress, HTML,

DHMTL, XML, Java, VBScript, SActiveX, Perl, CGI,

Sockets, ISPAI, NSAPI, are great for employing

techies, but have nothing to do with cash flow or

bottom line. The bankruptcy trail of .COMs is the

direct result of investors listening to engineers

about marketing. So even the decision makers in

management have changed with this new kind of

marketing. But The Internet is here to stay and,

those businesses who exploit it with well conceived

strategies will become the Stock Exchange

leaders of 2030. What can E-mail and the web do for

a company from the marketing point of view? Email

can reduce a communication budget for a company

with 200 work stations by $7.2 million annually

without reducing the volume. The web can get people

who read the URL to send money to people who own

the URL. The objective of the web site is to

stimulate this transfer of money. Unique features

are that it is a newspaper and magazine that

republishes itself daily for eternity with

corrections and updates as needed, without printing

or circulation costs and without requiring

destruction of trees, and with available circulation always

equal to that portion of the total population of the planet that

has access to a monitor. The cost of printing one

magazine is also the cost for printing 5 billion

copies of the magazine. .COMs have realized their

distribution and revenue objectives but not their

expense and overhead objectives. What is going

wrong is that market size has been overestimated,

factory design has been left to engineers instead

of marketing executives; impulse buyer market size

has been overestimated. Overlapping markets sharing

the same global customer bases has been ignored in

budgeting the software and server. People are using

the Web. But those who believe it is important to

"capture the users", have been willing to spend to acquire

a 747 so they may carry one passenger, expecting someday the

plane will have a full load. An organization must

realize net after tax revenue from its web site, in

excess of the direct and indirect cost of sales and

its investment in the tools of production (in this

case software) be consistent with such a budget,

and utilize conventional advertising to reach the

consumer or business and attract them to the site.

What should you do?.... Hire us and we'll tell you

Want to talk to Dr. Palms right now?

Thanks for listening.

Peter Palms PhD