N E W S R E L E A S E

Media contact: Jack Lyness, e-agency (510) 304-2411 - jlyness@e-agency.com
For immediate release: 12/26/02

 

2003 to bring more power to all Internet users, e-agency predicts

OAKLAND, CA - The coming year will be good for those online - both users and providers, buyers and sellers - predicts e-agency, Inc., the Oakland-based full-service Internet marketing company.

According to Dave Dunn, e-agency's chief executive officer, in 2003:

• " The words "dot com," by themselves or combined with anything else, will disappear. The term has become so clichéd it has completely lost any effective meaning. It's become a turn-off. Internet-related phenomena will continue to have increasingly critical impacts on business and society - we just won't use those words any more. The Internet is as healthy as it ever was. But the term "dot com" is dead. We used it up.
  
  
• " Internet users next year will get more control over their online lives, finding help with unwanted e-mail and more intrusive forms of online advertising. (There will certainly be more spam, but there will also be more ways to avoid it.)
  
  
• " Online marketers will find new ways to effectively market their goods and services to customers who actually want them.
  
  
• " Web site owners will find they have more control over the content of their sites, and the technology they can use to deliver it, and the costs of keeping up a Web site will drop.
  
  
• " Web use will continue to grow and improve, and continue to become a more routine part of our daily lives.
  
  
• "2003 will be another important year for the evolution of the Internet," predicted Dunn.

There will be more Internet-based marketing, in general, Dunn said. "There has to be - the medium is just too powerful for marketers to ignore." Online buying this holiday season has been reported up as much as 38 percent over last year. But consumers will also begin using their power of outrage to force the demise of the most intrusive forms of Internet marketing, including pop-up and pop-under ads that annoy Web users, and hated spam - unwanted e-mail.

The next year will undoubtedly see more changes in Web-site and service-provider policies aimed at exorcizing these demons - changes like those made recently by AOL, Google and Earthlink - that just may work, Dunn said. There will also undoubtedly be a flood of products and services to "block" or "blast" these various unwanted effects out of your online world. Most of these won't work.

Dunn said the key for companies who want to appropriately tap into the power of the Internet to market their products and services will be focusing on well-targeted prospects, and delivering marketing messages to them that these prospects actually want to know about, and in media that they want - or at least are willing - to use.

Pay-for-position is affordable and effective

In the advertising field, the move toward better-qualified targets may take the form of keyword-based pay-for-position marketing on search engines. "It may be today's best advertising buy," Dunn said. The advertiser takes advantage of the fact that the user is already actively looking for something they have to offer, and the advertiser pays a very small fee (in comparison to online display advertising costs) to make sure their product or service comes up high in the search.

Startup costs can be as little as a $5 set-up fee and a commitment of at least five cents per click-through to the advertiser's Web site. Other services charge on the basis of the number of leads or sales actually generated. One e-agency client, for example, www.MyIPTelephone.com, a San Ramon-based IP telephone system accessory store, spends no more than $1,000 a month on keyword advertising and is more than covering the cost of the program. Another client, advertising a vacation home in Mexico, receives about three calls a week from an advertising budget of $10 per day.

For e-mail, the list is the key

In the field of e-mail marketing, developing carefully targeted lists will be the key. "You might liberally define spam as all the e-mail that you, as an e-mail receiver, don't want to get," Dunn noted. So the secret for advertisers will be to send their offers whenever possible to receivers who have already said they'd like to receive it.

More and more Web sites will ask users for their e-mail addresses so they can keep them informed about opportunities that they want to know about. Dunn estimated that the number of e-agency's sites that "harvest" their visitors voluntary e-mail information will grow from about 5 percent at present to at least 25 percent by the end of 2003.

As a means of attracting "acquisition" targets - those new to the advertiser and his message - and cutting through the clutter, more-active forms of rich media - sound and video - in e-mail will improve and be used with increasing sophistication as high-speed Internet access becomes more common.

Mixed media campaigns will maximize the power of the Internet

Marketers are also likely to mix media more often, combining communications power with low cost - using various direct contact forms like mail or e-mail to refer to information on Web sites, sometimes even personalized information aimed at unique, individual audiences.

One campaign that e-agency helped with used personalized microsites to boost the response rate on a direct mail campaign to 6 percent - unheard of for direct mail alone.

"We see the Internet as a profound way to maximize the value of any other form of marketing communications," Dunn said.

New products offer more control for Web site owners

Major changes for Web site owners in the coming year will produce more control, through a variety of content management system improvements.

"One of the most elegant we've seen is the introduction of Macromedia Contribute," e-agency senior vice president Jack Lyness said, referring to a new software that lets Web site owners to change or add words and graphics to their site without knowing any code or having technical skills, and without any risk of making a mistake that might "break" the site. And the price is very affordable. "If it takes off as we believe it will, watch for Microsoft to follow suit, maybe with some kind of FrontPage-lite," Lyness predicted.

Owners of more sophisticated sites will also be using more dynamic content and control-panel-driven databases, Lyness suggested. This will likely also result in more personalized Web sites, those which recognize visitors who are registered users and offer them content unique to their declared wants and needs or their past activities on the site.

Linux and open-source software - which is generally available online and free of charge - will continue to gain in popularity, especially among Web server owners who have the technical expertise and sense of adventure to do their own maintenance.

Web will continue to grow into more areas of our lives

The number of people online and the amount of time they spend there, both in our local communities and around the world, will continue to grow. But the Internet will also become a larger, yet almost ignored part of our daily lives, Dunn predicted.

More people will use services like Fandango to order movie tickets before they get to the theater, and services like Netflix to have home entertainment delivered to their door.

Internet-based services will be showing up on more of our digital phones, on the dashboards of more cars, and even on the walls in public spaces around us. 2003 is likely to be the first year that more photographs are recorded digitally worldwide than on film, making them even easier to share via the Internet. We will shop and pay our bills online more often without thinking about it.

Because companies like e-agency are growing in sophistication as the power of the Web evolves, it is easier every day for any company - large or small - to take it's own place on the Internet, Dunn said, and easier, as a result, for them to provide the products and services to their customers in they ways they are coming to expect. "It's not scary anymore," Dunn said. "We can help."

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E-agency, Inc., is an interactive marketing communications agency, with specializations in advertising, public relations, cause-related marketing, strategic marketing consulting, response marketing, graphic design, and, at the heart of the agency, a complete range of Internet services designed to boost the performance of any and all communications tools. E-agency's specific Internet services include Web design, development and management, e-mail marketing, Web site marketing, wireless Web implementation, e-commerce development, secure on-site Web and e-mail hosting, and database programming and management.

E-agency clients include Oakland International Airport, Safeway, the Shorenstein Company, AT&T, the Marin Institute, Special Olympics Northern California, the Alameda County Transportation Authority, KaiserAir, the California Water Environment Association, Gold East Paper Company, the Port of Sacramento, the cities of Alameda, Gilroy and El Cerrito, and Matthews International Fund. The agency hosts more than 250 Web sites, with clients in 23 U.S. states and nine other countries.

The Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce selected e-agency as its entrepreneurial company of the year for 2002.

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More information is available at: www.e-agency.com, Logos and photos scanned specifically for print publication are available at www.givememore.com/e-agency.