An e-mail advertising medium, which backers claim will replace
’dying’ banner advertising, is to launch in the UK next year.
Greenchip Investment, an Ofex-listed company, will start looking for a
sales and marketing director and sales team to sell the new concept to
European advertisers in around six weeks’ time.
The medium, yet to be named, will be a version of the US outfit,
Megachain, which launches in the US next month. Megachain works by
recruiting ’agents’ - anyone with an e-mail address who is willing to
receive ad details from ’vendors’.
Agents will select offers and forward them on. Every time the e-mail is
clicked through to the advertiser’s site, the agent will receive a
commission from the vendor.
Subscription to the service will be free for advertisers, who will only
have to pay the agent if the recipient of the correspondence clicks on
the ad. However, Megachain is yet to announce the names of any vendors
or reveal how many agents have signed up.
According to Greenchip’s research, banner advertising is ’rapidly
reducing’ in its effectiveness. It says there has been a significant
fall in click-through rates (CTRs), from 2 per cent to under 0.5 per
cent in the last 12 months.
’Evidence suggests that the sheer volume of banner advertising is
annoying a lot of new users,’ said Jonathan Haswell, new technologies
analyst at Greenchip Investments, who will initially oversee the UK
venture.
However, new-media analyst Fletcher Research said some campaigns get
CTRs as high as 35 per cent.
Haswell said candidates for the top sales job must be ’highly internet
literate.’ He added that it was too early to say how many sales people
he was looking for.
