While the concept has taken a while to sink in, most companies with online pretensions have finally realized a truth astoundingly obvious to wired markets: The Web is not TV. Still, many companies don't understand precisely how the Internet differs from the older broadcast medium - or why this difference is such a big deal. But for e-commerce to be successful, the deal doesn't get much bigger.
From a marketing perspective, TV's effectiveness depends on factors that are missing in action online. Foremost among these is a captive, passive audience. If remote controls and a few dozen cable channels throw TV advertisers into a panic, the mouse and a million Web sites give them coronaries. The optimal TV viewer is a quasi-humanoid vegetable too lazy to flip to another program, and just happily glazed enough to absorb a company's intrusive-branding blipvert.
TV advertisers invest heavily in market research, hoping to reach some target market segment. Despite such demographic slicing and dicing, the core axiom remains: One message fits all. If you're watching a particular show, you're going to get all the ads purchased in that time slot.
These assumptions don't port to the Internet - at all. Yet many companies, hoping to replicate their success with broadcast advertising, dysfunctionally incorporate this same set of expectations into their Web sites, then wonder what went wrong. Nothing went wrong. Web audiences are simply not captive, not passive, not willing to accept one-size-fits-all anything - especially not unsolicited commercial "messages," however cleverly disguised. While the Web represents a massive new marketplace, it's not a "mass market" in the traditional sense. Nor does it behave like one. It behaves exactly like what it is: the largest collection of micromarkets the world has ever seen.
We say "Microsoft (MSFT) owns the desktop," and on its face, that seems a reasonable statement. But wait ... I'm running Win98.
Does that mean Microsoft owns me? I don't think so. When I see the rhetorical question "Where do you want to go today?" I crack up. Because the answer is: anyplace I damn well please.
Are companies stuck with an Internet they literally don't know what to do with? In many cases, yes. Broadcast selling worked wonders in an era of old-media mass markets - even if we didn't much like it, we didn't have much choice. But it doesn't work nearly as well in the context of new-media Web micromarkets - we still don't much like it, and now we do have a choice. Millions of them, in fact.
So what, if anything, will work online? After all, companies aren't going to hang around long if they can't sell us stuff online. The answer has to do with how we think about their stuff. If it's stuff that interests me, then I don't need pitching; I'm already sold on the value of the thing. If it's stuff that doesn't interest me, no amount of pitching will do much good. In fact, it will just irritate me.
A relatively new category of software tools and technologies is emerging to link existing interests with relevant products. The generic name for the category is "personalization." The product recommendations on Amazon.com (AMZN) and CDnow (dossier) are among the most visible demonstrations of this approach. Both sites suggest items that may interest a particular customer, based on explicit rankings or purchase histories of other customers with similar tastes. These tools mine large bodies of data to discover and predict implicit correlations of interest and perceived value - in essence, the glue that creates and defines micromarkets. The power of such software lies in its ability to explore market behavior bottom up. This is a far better fit for the Web than the top-down market research required by older, offline markets.
As powerful and well matched to the Web as such tools may be, effectively applying them is not just a matter of technology. Companies that truly understand the dynamics
