The Online Ad Sales panelists drove home the point of the value of well-targeted online ads for B2B advertisers. Mitch Rouda, President of Hanley-Wood Interactive, summed up the current attitude toward online advertising among his constituents this way: "everyone knows it works and we can prove it!" In Rouda's words, online buyer's guides succeed as advertising vehicles because they "reach specifiers at the point of decision". Just the fact that he refers to his target market as "specifiers" is enough evidence to prove that they are distinct from the average online shopper. For Hanley-Wood, they know that the user of their ebuild.com site is in the market for building products and that the buyer, excuse me, specifier, will have well-defined requirements regarding size, color, material and other product dimensions.

Mitch and his team are obviously doing something right. Online ad sales are tracking at about $3.6 million for 2004 and Mitch is gunning for "five in five", that is, $5 million in ad sales in 2005. Not bad.

Jim Mitchell from KellySearch, a Reed Business Information company that produces a worldwide product directory, seconded the themes introduced by Rouda. KellySearch launched in 2001 and now 90% of the company's business has moved online. KellySearch uses Google's AdSense for Search, which is essentially the new name for AdWords for Search. Since the content on KellySearch consists of product lists by category, selecting keywords for KellySearch doesn't involve much guesswork: you just select which category headings you want to bid on. KellySearch's success with Google AdWords and AdSense provide enough positive results so that Mitchell's talk could have been called "Maneuvering the Search Engines."

The main point made in the Online Ad Sales session--which also included the CoStar Group that provides information for commercial real estate brokers and Industrial Quick Search, which is a virtual aggregator that helps directory publishers with search engine optimization (SEO)--was the importance of matching the advertisers with sites that attract the right community of users. In other words, it's the quality of the eyeballs or leads that matter. And B2B advertisers are willing to pay for quality leads. It's like the theme of Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: in an environment where the motto is "always be closing" you have to have the premium leads.