For years and years, advertisers have touted the potential of the Internet as a place where entrepreneurs could pinpoint targeted consumers. Now, finally, it appears that businesses are taking interactive advertising seriously on the Web ? And beyond. Companies that have advertised on everything from billboards to newspapers to television are beginning to revamp all of their marketing strategies. They are beginning to see that Internet advertising can work despite some of the technology glitches and privacy issues that challenged the earlier waves of the technology.



Pointing to the success of Internet pioneers like Google, advertisers are eager to discover new ways to try and sell their products based on the kind of searches initiated by consumers into online search engines. It is becoming a sort of earth-shattering shift for many established advertising agencies, old-media style advertisers, which have often had trouble keeping up in the Information Age.

See, so many creative, but perhaps uninspired, advertisers remain stuck in a mindset that favors 30-second TV commercials, or old-school ads on billboards or newspapers. But the new shift is to the Internet. And the next wave has already been targeted ? all-new forms of interactive ads that provide business with pinpoint tracking technology that measure the impact of advertising campaigns online.

Still, nobody should expect that the advertising business is about to change overnight. Some Internet advertising capabilities and the new form of web-based advertising are already beginning to garner new credibility and they seem to gain new accolades every day. Soon the Internet will be taking many, many dollars away from the old-school advertising outlets such as newspapers, billboards and other print publications.

As the demand for accountability rises, advertisers are certain to devote more resources to performance-based campaigns, which are most effectively launched via the Internet. That is why most experts predict that an ever-growing amount of web-based advertisements will be appearing in the years to come. One prediction you can bank on is that the Internet will continue to see an increasing percentage of the estimated $260 billion that is spent on all kinds of U.S. advertising each year.