“Since its inception a few years ago, the mavens of Net marketing have promised the world to online consumers: ‘one-to-one’ relationships and offers tailored to your every taste or preference; pop-up ads, ‘interstitial’ ads, and banner ads of every stripe tailored to your data profile; emails crammed with ads themselves; and so on. And they screamed loud enough — on television ads and billboards around the country — for everyone to hear. Truth is, the multimillion-dollar dot-com marketing budgets still haven’t delivered much bang for their buck, and Wall Street and consumers are losing patience. Here’s a look at what’s working, what’s not, and the people behind the scenes of online marketing who are driving change.”

“The other day, a writer interviewing me for another online publication asked me a very interesting question: ‘Why is ClickZ profitable while Salon.com is not?’”

“Many e-businesses start with a great idea, but they still fail to make it in the Internet economy. What do they overlook, and how can you learn from their mistakes?”

“The following are some of the larger promotional firms out of the 4,500 members listed on Promotional Products Association International’s Web site.”

” individual universities, departments and researchers; Indices; professional associations; consultancy services and more.

“Can you explain what exactly it is your business does? Can you make your company’s mission perfectly clear to anyone who asks? That may sound like a ridiculous question, but explaining a company can be more difficult than you think. It can be particularly difficult for those people running cutting-edge high-technology companies to explain what exactly it is their company does in a way that other people understand the instant they say it. One solution: Stop talking and start drawing.”

“Let’s face it, the average online customer can be compared to William Hurt, floating in an isolation tank in some University basement, only without all of the electrodes and pre-historic peyote. So what’s an online entrepreneur to do? If your business is to meet the challenge of selling in a narrow-band, sensory-deprived medium, you must become information intensive. Information intensity involves shifting the focus away from tangible resources and on to information.”