BOL.co.uk, the company that is trying to stop Amazon.com dominating e-commerce in the UK, is negotiating to sign at least ten major advertising deals in the next six weeks, says UK managing director Georges Aoun. BOL.co.uk is already the only bookseller that has banner advertising and hyperlinks on the UK sites of AOL, Compuserve, Lycos and UK electronic retailer Dixon’s Freeserve.
BOL.co.uk, which was officially launched this week is a subsidiary of the cash rich German publishing giant Bertelsmann, which has an ambitious strategy to become a world leader in e- commerce. It has several e-commerce sites in Europe with more planned this year and stakes in US bookseller Barnes & Noble and AOL. Bertelsmann was originally Books On Line but it has since been renamed Bertelsmann On Line to encompass its ambitions beyond books.
A key part of Bertelsmann’s strategy has been to negotiate exclusive banner advertising with major web site providers. Freeserve, the controversial but highly popular free internet service operated by UK retailer Dixons, is the latest company to swoon to the Bertelsmann charm, but it would say nothing about why it chose to place BOL.co.uk exclusively on its home page. Aoun, however, said it was in Freeserve’s interests to limit the number of banners and hyperlinks on an already crowded page.
BOL won exclusive advertising rights with AOL and Compuserve throughout Europe with relative ease, perhaps because AOL- Compuserve Europe is an AOL/Bertelsmann 50/50 joint venture. But winning future exclusive deals may not be so easy. Heinz Wermelinger, BOL’s international CEO and president, is well aware of this. It would be crazy for a paper to say it would take ads from just one client, he pointed out, adding that it was therefore natural that not all future BOL deals would be exclusive.
