"Our objective behind advertising on the Web - or anything else for that matter - is to deliver meaningful brand-sell messages. But the road to achieving that is very much an experimental one."
Elizabeth Moore, Spokeswoman, Procter & Gamble, USA
"Our interest will increase when there are more sophisticated ways of measuring [the audience]."
Spokeswoman, Coca Cola Company, USA
"Hits, by their very nature, are dishonest and if publishers are using hits as the only measure of their site then they are short changing their users and advertisers. Hits mean nothing."
John Barnes, Publisher of Newmedia, VNU, April 1997
"Web advertising clearly represents no paradigm shift in the way the advertising world conducts its business, and in the best case scenario will equal 2.64% of all ad spending in 2000"
Jupiter Communications, April 1997
"Having a Web site is no longer a sign of being on the cutting edge. It might be a sign of not doing much original thinking."
Adam Schoenfeld, Jupiter Communications, March 1997
"We naturally are as anxious as anybody else to determine how effective our Web advertising is and what we're getting for our money, but given that the medium itself is still evolving, as is the definition of advertising on the medium, we think patience is in order."
Elizabeth Moore, Spokeswoman, Procter & Gamble, USA
"The Internet is the most important development in mass communications since the invention of the printing press."
New York Times, March 1997
"In an interactive environment people have to want to come and find you. Personal care rather than household products are better able to create that spontaneous interest."
Jerry Wright, Marketing Director, Home Care Products, Lever Brothers, May 1997
"Our strategy is simply to have Nabisco on the Web. It's experimental, and we'll see where we can go with it."
Michael Perry, Media Director, Nabisco Foods, USA
"It's not experimental, we have a real commitment to interactive advertising."
Spokeswoman, Kraft Foods, USA, Oct 96
"History has taught us that changes in the distribution of goods and services create substantial business opportunities for deft companies. With the Internet, which offers ubiquitous points-of-sale, advertising in time will become, in effect, transactions, thus making the total business opportunity created by the Web quite substantial."
Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley, December 1996
"Marketing on the Web is going to be a lot more humane than marketing in traditional mass media because it's possible to treat people individually."
Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web, March 1997
"The web is the best way of creating brand personalities. The ultimate idea for Durex is to gain global branding, and the web is an excellent way of doing that. The web is the focal point of our global brand and we need to make people aware of it."
Vincent Jeanniard, New Media Manager, Durex, May 1997
"You have to see a lot more growth (of the Internet) before the advertising model becomes profitable"
Bill Gates, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft, March 1997
"All of these new technologies will make it possible to conduct a more personal dialogue with the Consumer. And once that's possible, the Consumer will expect it. The mass audience will be transformed into a mass of individual audiences. To talk relevantly and persuasively to those audiences - whether you're offering them a packet of peas, a social benefit or a political party – will take a great deal of skill and sensitivity. And I know this - one of the means of doing it will be advertising."
Sir Michael Perry, Chairman, Unilever plc, January 1996
"Advertising is strongly frowned upon by the Internet community"
Nick Rosen, Managing Director, Intervid (Internet content consultancy), 1995
"It's not even a question of years, but of months. Interactive will be a prevalent form of advertising by the beginning of 1995."
Marc Andressen, MOSAIC (Internet software co.), 1994
"Brand' sites almost always fail."
Steve Bowbrick, Chairman, Webmedia Group Ltd., July 1998
"The Internet is much more than a passive advertising vehicle. It's a shopping tool that fills the role of the knowledgeable salesperson consumers need, but usually can't find. The Internet appears to be accelerating purchase decisions."
Stephanie Shern, Vice Chairman of Industry Services, Ernst & Young, January 1998
"The advertising opportunities we currently have on the web are really pretty limited. Simply put, the current state of web advertising just isn't effective enough to warrant any truly meaningful investment from us."
"The biggest barrier with shopping is the time and inconvenience [of going] shopping. This is clearly a way to solve that and the way that the benefits of our brands can be accentuated in this kind of environment [is] the automatic replenishment, for example, of the toothbrush every three months so that we're meeting ADA standards for teeth care."
"I think it's very difficult to have a meaningful brand interaction with a consumer on a banner. Not impossible ... They've been done ... but more importantly, it just doesn't leverage the possibilities of the medium."
"I think [new media] is dramatically changing the meaning of what a brand is from what would be primarily an atomic kind of, 'I experienced the product, I used the product.' OK, that's the old model of the brand and the hallmarks are safety, quality, reliability. New world, you add into it a whole level of information that allows the consumer to operate at a much higher level. So you've got information. Now you've got service on top of that. This is not an area typical to packaged goods marketing. We may yet see revenue streams from service activities coming into a brand. No doubt that will happen ... I think these technologies are simply accelerating our ability to take what were historically nice marketing ideas but not really doable, to breakthrough marketing ideas that are doable ..."
"People need to know very little about our products for 99 per cent of their lives. And when they do need to know about them, its for a very short time, and then they need to know a great deal. So it's not really suited to traditional media. New media allows us to give people as much depth as they want exactly when they want it."
Terry Gregory, Commercial Director, Rugby Joinery, UK, June 1998
"Its not about impressions, its about time spent....how long are people spending with the message?"
Bob Pittman, President, AOL, US, August 1998
"Banners are not the answer as people ignore them."
Frederic Colas, Director of Interactive Marketing, Procter & Gamble, USA, October 1998
"We spend less than 1% of our worldwide media budget online. I don't get excited about the Internet and it's going to take a long time for me to be persuaded."
Patrick Burton, Vice President of Media and Brand Communications Worldwide, Allied Domecq, UK, October 1998
"Instead of asking how you advertise on the internet, we should ask what special benefit or added value you can provide to consumers, as a result of it being unique."
Mike Cleary, Vice President, European Marketing, Procter & Gamble, November 1999
"We will never be successful in the digital environment unless we dramatically expand our definition of what constitutes a brand, to redefine the whole notion of branding, so that it includes not only the performance benefit of the product, but also the full experience associated with it."
Mike Cleary, Vice President, European Marketing, Procter & Gamble, November 1999
"Its all about grabbing the customer relationship back from the retailers."
Christian Purser, Consultant, Spearhead Marketing, UK, November 1999
"Database management will help us to...cross-market between two food products...or even a food product and a personal care product."
Marc de Swaan Arons, Director of Interactive Brand Center, Unilever, US, November 1999
"We are moving from a world of mass marketing, global advertising and brand awareness to a world of one-to-one relationships - one in which customers will interact with what they want to and suppliers will survive only by their knowledge of their customers and of their preferences and intentions. The very concepts of broadcasting and of the practice of mass advertising that underpin much of our industry today may be on their way out."
Miles Flint, President, Sony Broadcast & Professional Europe, December 1999
"Advertising on the Net will become increasingly worthless. In the US, buy.com is a zero margin e-tailer which makes money from advertising. We do not think this is viable."
Jim Mellon, Chairman & Chief Executive, Regent Pacific Group, UK, January 2000
"I don't think we've really worked out what we're doing in cyberspace in terms of marketing. I sometimes wonder if it could become some sort of gold rush to a ghost town."
William Gibson, Author, Canada, November 1999
"A few years ago not a single commercial had an internet address. How many advertisements today exist without one? Half of them? And within two years there won't be any left."
Bill Gates, April 2000
"It is safe to say that word of mouth is - even in this age of mass communications and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns - still the most important form of human communication."
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, Feb 2000
"When it comes to building brands and generating sales, internet advertising cannot boast a single success story."
Michael Winkler, European Media Director, Gillette Group, November 2000
"The advertising community has abandoned the internet."
Michael Eisner, Chairman and Chief Executive, Walt Disney, US, January 2001
