Enough golfing. Enough with the Jeep tours. Enough cigar parties. It's all business on day two of e-Biz.

Greg Stuart of cars.com gave an entertaining presentation of the evolution of an ad campaign. In a series of slides, Stuart took attendees through various incarnations of an offline campaign, offering up the sometimes-humorous feedback of the various test focus groups cars.com used to gauge the effectiveness of each print ad message. (One focus group comment about the car-buying ad: "Is this a subliminal sex message?")

What did cars.com learn from its ad efforts?

• Don't attempt to be overly clever in your ad message...your audience just won't get it.
• Sell the category first.
• Educate and help your audience.
• Keep the message simple, but don't talk down to your audience.
• You can't overuse the "www" cues for those who aren't in the internet "club."
• The public likes the web...but not as much as we all do. They aren't necessarily passionate about it.
• Don't assume anything about your audience.

Bargain of the Day

How much do you suppose cars.com paid for their highly recallable domain name? For a cool $100,000, cars.com bought itself a name...and the number-three spot in consumer brand awareness in its market.

Nevertheless, the company isn't taking any chances that there will be a car shopper around who hasn't heard of cars.com. The company has allocated $35 million over the next 18 months for its ad budget.

Building Brand Dominance

How do online companies achieve brand dominance within their markets? Karen Askey of Preview Travel gave the skinny on how her online company seeks to achieve just that within the travel industry.

• Focus on a huge market. Travel is a huge (and growing) business.
• Lock up exclusive relationships with dominant portals. (Preview has relationships with 5 of the 8 top ones.)
• Continuously enhance services, especially by integrating content with services.
• Diversify revenue streams. In addition to selling travel, Preview sells ad space on its site, runs a travel store, and sells services like travel insurance. "We are everything about travel," Askey said.
• Create brand and consumer loyalty in an otherwise highly fragmented market.
• Lead e-commerce initiatives through personalized database marketing.

How's Preview faring? In the last year, the online travel company saw its user base expand from 2.1 million users to 5.6 million. That effectively means that Preview is adding over 1 million users a quarter.

Three Easy Steps to Customer Retention...

...as outlined by egghead.com's Jon Brodeur.

1. Start with a strong and compelling offer.
2. Make your site intuitive, easy to navigate and to shop from.
3. Get your customers to leave their email addresses for future targeted marketing efforts.

Why Do Business on the 'Net?

Scott Cohen of 24/7 Media quoted research in which 60 percent of the businesses surveyed said they do business online to take the market lead. A quarter of those surveyed said they are online because that's where their customers are. Another 10 percent say they are there to keep up with the competition. And less than 10 percent are there to experiment.

"Those numbers represent something of a switch from recent history," Cohen said.

Hundreds of Billions

We've all seen the growth projections for online commerce, which show an arrow at a 90-degree angle rising directly out of the X-axis and Y-axis. Van Vandegrift of Compaq asked, "How many times have we seen this?"

He added, "I think this is completely wrong..... It's not $40 billion...but hundreds of billions."

Quotes of the Day

"Walk into any Wal-Mart or K-Mart and you'll see end-cap displays, daily sales, blue-light specials...the internet is not like that at all. 1999 will be the year of internet merchandising." - Mark Goldstein, CEO, Impulse! Buy Network

"I don't think anyone can underestimate personal referrals. That's one of the most significant ways we generate customers." - Lisa Crane, VP, Universal Studios

"Look for anything 'Glenn.' And by Glenn I mean John Glenn, anything top-of-mind or topical." - Mark Goldstein, in laying out the necessary steps to web merchandising

"Take advantage of what the real-world retailer isn't doing." - Samantha Saturn, Director of Marketing, Music Boulevard

"Press relations or public relations is one of the foundations of any branding effort." - Karen Askey, SVP of Consumer Marketing, Preview Travel

"What we offer is a power impulse buy. It's a you-snooze-you-lose offer." - Mark Goldstein

"Offline advertising can definitely help online results." - Jon Brodeur, Chief Marketing Officer, egghead.com

"Subject lines that talk about site updates...have actually out-pulled the word FREE." - Karen Askey, in describing Preview Travel's email marketing efforts

"ROI is really a way to take the adjectives and adverbs out of an interactive marketer's pleas for larger budgets every year." - Greg Wester, Senior Member, Organic Online

"I'm Scott Cohen - one of the founders of 24/7. For those of you who don't know me, just ask the person beside you." - "Master Networker" Scott Cohen, SVP, 24/7 Media

"We've figured out most of it. But we still need to figure out merchandising and marketing." -- Mark Goldstein

"The question is: Has size become a handicap, rather than an advantage?" -- Alex Sozonoff, VP of Hewlett Packard, in explaining why HP has been slow in implementing its online program

"Just like we don't want to be Amazoned...we don't want to be Dell-ized. I think we are being Dell-ized." - Alex Sozonoff

"Twelve of us run OfficeDepot.com. We are essentially a start-up inside a Fortune 500 company." - Keith Butler, Executive Director of Marketing and Merchandising, OfficeDepot.com

"Going online is a strategic not a technology decision." -- Alex Sozonoff

"What I am trying to create at OfficeDepot.com are barriers to exit.... I want to create a site where it's difficult for a customer to go anywhere else to buy." -- Keith Butler, OfficeDepot.com

Bad Timing Award

Mark Goldstein of the Impulse! Buy Network might have chosen a better time to introduce a new effort he is helping to spearhead. Merch.net, in conjunction the Direct Marketing Association, is unveiling a new internet direct marketing arm of the DMA, and Goldstein pre-announced the press splash being made Wednesday. (Impulse! is a member of Merch.net.)

Not a problem...except that the inaugural meeting of the Internet Direct Marketing Bureau will also take place tomorrow, here at e-Biz. And the guys from IMI had just finished inviting conference attendees to the kick-off luncheon.

The folks at IMI were plenty gracious when queried. But the timing of Goldstein's announcement from the e-Biz podium seemed a tad...well, tacky.

Tchotchke of the Day

It was beginning to feel a little bit like a tchotchke-free zone in the exhibitor area. Squishy balls, puzzle cubes, baseball hats...time for some new merchandise, guys. But the hip-hugging fanny pack from emaginet fits today's call for Top Tchotchke nicely. There's room for keys, some cash, a few business cards, and - best of all - an e-centives-branded bottle of water for this dry desert locale.

Ann Handley is editor in chief of the ClickZ Network. Ann's role at ClickZ is to maintain an element of balance and sanity, and she spends an inordinate amount of time sharpening her editorial buzz saw and other surgical instruments. She is a fixture at the local Starbucks, and she takes her coffee straight into the IV.

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