Key stakeholders in the internet advertising world, including advertisers, ad-supported web publishers, ad agencies and technology suppliers, have united to promote advertising and marketing on the internet. And to think we never realized there was any shortage of the stuff. A summit hosted by Proctor & Gamble Co in Cincinnati provided the occasion for the group to form. Four major industry bodies, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the Advertising Research Foundation, are represented on the steering committee of the new group, which calls itself FAST (Future of Advertising Stakeholders) Forward. The stakeholders want big ad spenders like AT&T, Clorox, Coca- Cola and McDonalds to invest more than they currently do in ads that will run on the internet. Proctor & Gamble itself is a case in point: only $12m of its $3bn annual advertising budget is presently earmarked for the web. For their part, advertisers want to know how they can be expected to increase web ad investments when accurate measures of return on that investment have yet to be devised. Accordingly, FAST Forward has set up four task forces, one each to examine consumer acceptance of internet ads, the effectiveness of various ad models, different ways of measuring reach and methods to make it easier for advertisers to buy web space.
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