IT strategy - Time for pop-ups to pop off.

(From Financial Director)

Byline: Tom Berry.

Back in the late 1990s when clicks, not bricks, ruled the stock markets I was asked to put together a small business plan for one of my previous employers. The proposition was simple - put all the information the division produced and sold in paper format up on a website for free public access. Publishing suicide? Not at all - it would all be paid for with online advertising.

The project never got off the ground, but if it had it would have proved costly. Advertising rarely yielded enough to cover the huge investment that many companies made in their online offerings, and once-revolutionary advertising concepts such as 'pop-ups' were soon considered to cause annoyance to the user rather than encourage them to click through the ad.

In the US we are starting to see a seachange in online advertising. AOL recently announced that it would be scrapping pop-up ads from its websites because they were annoying customers. And search engine Ask Jeeves said that in 2003 it will no longer carry banner advertising across the top of its web pages.

This last move, according to an Ask Jeeves press release, is designed to create "a contextually relevant and effective experience for all" - in English that means banner advertising was just not delivering the goods.

The company is now going to concentrate on providing targeted branding opportunities on email alerts and raising money through directory entries on the website.