While there has been a huge slowdown in online advertising by dot-com companies, bricks-and-mortar corporations are beginning to take the Web seriously. Forrester Research found that traditional companies spent 8 percent of their overall budgets on digital media in 2000, with a median expenditure of $550,000. The companies estimated that this allocation would rise to 15 percent by 2003 – with a median budget of $1 million – and to 25 percent in 2005.

The online advertising business had revenues of $8.2 billion in 2000 – more than the "outdoor" category ($5 billion last year), and not that far behind the cable-TV ad business, which produced total revenue of about $14 billion last year.

It's not difficult to figure out why large companies are eyeing the Net: sometime late last summer, the share of U.S. households that are online passed 50 percent. Advertisers will follow their customers. To do so, however, they need to have enticing ways to reach them. And until very recently, Web publishers, advertisers, and ad agencies were slow to exploit the technological possibilities of the Web. Go to almost any Web page and you'll still find a 468-by-60-pixel banner at the top of it – for the most part, advertisers have been content to treat the banner as an inert announcement – "the billboard of the information highway." Like a billboard, it's designed to get your attention, and also like a billboard, it's not a very interesting concept. Plus, once you click the banner, you often land on a boring corporate homepage that does little to engage your interest.

But now that larger, traditional companies are venturing online, they’re demanding results, prompting advertising agencies to look for ways to make online advertising more effective. Some examples:

A recent campaign for Saab was intended to get qualified potential buyers to sign up for Saab test-drives. Instead of running a banner, links were placed on sites that appeal to the same high-end yuppie consumers who go for Swedish cars. So on Epicurious.com, the site "for people who eat," Saab put up a link that read, "Visit Napa Valley – in a Saab." When gastronomes clicked, an ad popped up telling them that there was a sweepstakes for a Saab, which they could enter by signing up for a test-drive. After they filled out a little profile, a local dealer would call to make an appointment.

Johnson & Johnson used online advertising to market an acne medication. The campaign targeted teen chat rooms, and placed messages on Websites like Bolt.com that looked more like part of the site than like banner ads, encouraging teens to send talking postcards to their friends, which in turn led the bepimpled teens to an e-mail database that gave them each a skin analyzer and a coupon for a free sample. The campaign succeeded because Clean and Clear became part of the teenage girl community, as opposed to trying to direct people to stop what they were doing and click on a banner.

Red Sky Interactive in San Francisco created an award-winning campaign with the Miller Lite beer pager – which uses instant-message software to coordinate pub crawls.

Another innovation has been the introduction of new ad formats that are bigger and more prominent than the typical banner. The formats include larger banners that run the full width of the Web page, banners that run down the full length of a page, and large rectangular ads that are positioned within a Web page's editorial content. These aim to accomplish the same results as display ads in newspapers and magazines. The new formats can handle richer graphics and animation, and can provide far more interactivity within the ads. Thus, one of the new ads for Nextel cell phones running on CNET features a product demo of Nextel's new keypad text-entry system, which you can try out within the ad.

Then there’s the "superstitial." Billed as "the Internet's commercial," these are designed to work like TV ads. When you go from one page on a Website to another, they pop up in a window and play a 20-second animation. These ads now run on more than 350 Websites, including such major sites as Excite@home.

Simply put, the Internet offers advertisers something they can't resist -- the attention spans of a massive audience. And if there's one thing that the history of marketing has taught us, from the Fuller Brush man to the $2 million Super Bowl spot to the Target boxes that crop up on Survivor, it's that wherever there's a large audience, sooner or later the marketers will find a way to reach it.