Internet Branding
By Michael Alan Hamlin
April 2003

Early this year, CEO and publisher of Washingtonpost.com and Newsweek.MSNBC.com Christopher Schroeder surprised publishers, IT experts, and branding and marketing consultants alike when he announced that his "company saw advertising revenue jump 50 percent in the first nine months of 2002, a time when many media companies were seeing a devastating downturn."

Schroeder also argued that his company wasn't an exception among organizations that depend on online advertising revenue for their survival and profitability. "According to a recent Online Publishers Association survey of leading content sites, including WSJ.com, ESPN.com, Slate.com and several others, the average year-to-date advertising revenue increase has been over 33 percent," he wrote in The Asian Wall Street Journal.

One of the most interesting aspects of this unexpected surge in online advertising is that traditional companies now make up 60 percent of online advertisers. Schroeder notes, "The void left by bankrupt dot-coms has been filled by companies with staying power. These companies are spending, on average, nearly two-thirds more on Internet advertising than they did a year ago."

These advertisers have found that being visible to hundreds of millions of Internet users internationally that can immediately click through to their sites is a powerful brand building, retail, and lead generation tool. But what about Philippine advertisers and media sites? As is always the case with just about any empirical number here, no one really knows, and even the anecdotal evidence is unconvincing.

The general assumption is that online publishers in the Philippines aren't doing nearly as well as their North American counterparts, in large part because local advertisers aren't yet convinced that online advertising works. There some exceptions, however, and these are mostly multinational advertisers who contract online advertising out of regional headquarters. Of course, you don't have to be a publisher to realize online revenues - and profitability - as Internet dynamos e-Bay and lately, Yahoo!.com have pretty consistently shown.

In the Philippines, anecdotal evidence suggesting the power of the Internet for generating online advertising revenues, brand building, and online sales on corporate websites is a bit clearer than it is for publishers, at least to me. That's because of first-hand experience with brand building and service marketing on our own site, as well as those of some of our clients and other folks we regularly talk with in the course of networking around town.

For instance, Yehey!.com director Juan Chua recently told me that revenues this year have jumped, and the site is now profitable. Like myAyala.com, Yehey!.com's retail site is also showing signs of encouraging growth, according to Chua. That's in part because Yehey!.com has developed an ATM online transaction feature that provides secure direct debit services for over four million ATM holders in the Philippines - which is more than a million more than the total number of credit card holders here.

Our own experience with online purchasing hasn't been as encouraging, largely because booking seminar seats - unlike movie seats - is done by corporations that naturally prefer to pay by check than personal credit card. However, online marketing is a real success story for us. In fact, it's been so successful that we rarely resort to traditional snail-mail direct marketing at all. Our website has become such a pull for our demographic that even public workshops I do outside our principal markets of the Philippines and Hong Kong are advertised on our site at the request of the organizers (We'd put them there anyway, but it's a nice acknowledgement that we get asked to do so by these partners.).

David A. Aaker and Erick Joachimsthaler in their book, B®AND LEADERSHIP, say that three unique characteristics of the Internet account for the increasingly important role of the web for building brands. First, the Internet is "interactive and involving." For instance, it is an extremely fast resource for research. When I wrote my first book in 1996, virtually none of the companies we profiled had a web presence when I began. But by the time I submitted the completed manuscript, it was hard to find a company that didn't. The latest book is based almost completely on research done over the Internet. It also made interviewing far-flung executives and seeking permission to reproduce copyrighted material a snap. Of course, you can also play games, meet new people, argue opinions, or listen to the radio.

Second, the Internet offers "current, rich information" that is hard to duplicate with bulky, traditional direct mail pieces, and especially in a fax. Fax recipients typically get a bit testy when a fax exceeds one page. But on the Internet there is no limit to the information that we can provide about a seminar in terms of its content, speaker credentials, and what other people have to say about it.

Third, the Internet "personalizes." On Schwab.com users can customize their opening screen to provide a snapshot of their portfolio, research on potential investment opportunities, and the latest news on sectors in which the investor focuses.

WSJ.com will also send bulletins on breaking news involving companies in which the reader-investor is interested, as well as a regular, customized summary of news and feature stories. Same for the New York Times, and most other publishers. Harvard Business Review's site pushes alerts on new offerings out to me weekly, and we purchase - and immediately download - many of our seminar and workshop resource materials online. We in turn push information on our seminars, conferences, and meetings to organizations and people who say they prefer to receive our information over the Internet.

The Internet is becoming a powerful tool, despite contradictory evidence, even in the Philippines - especially if you are targeting upwardly mobile professionals, and corporate business. So don't assume it doesn't work. Because you're wrong if you do.

(Michael Alan Hamlin is the managing director of consultancy TeamAsia and the author of three books on Asian economies and companies. His latest book is Marketing Asian Places, of which he is a co-author (Wiley, 2001), and he is currently at work on High Visibility: The Making and Marketing of Asian Professionals into Celebrities. Write him at mahamlin@teamasia.com.).

Copyright © 2003 Michael Alan Hamlin. All Rights Reserved.

Media Archives