By Dave Lindorff

     This past year has seen a tidal wave of dot.com spending, particularly on top-dollar television advertising, but what are the results?
      While all the funny money from internet IPOs has been pushing up the cost of TV scatter prices, it turns out it hasn't been doing much for dot.com traffic, according to Media Metrix.
      According to the monitoring service, for example, Etrade.com, the No. 1 ad spender in the sector, spent $89 million on  advertising in the first nine months of 1999, but its traffic dropped from 1.6 million visits in July to 1.5 million in September, and only rose to 1.9 million in December after another quarter of even heavier spending.
      Go.com, Disney's troubled internet property,  spent $20 million on advertising in the first three quarters, and saw its visits go from 19 million in July to 18.8 million in September and December.
 Priceline.com, which also spent $20 million during the first nine months of the last year, also saw its visits decline, from 2.7 million in July to 1.8 million in September and 2.0 million in December.
     Snap.com, another top spender, laid out $38 million on ads in the first three quarters of the year but saw visits go from 10.1 million in July to 9.2 million in September and just 9.1 million in November.
    Discover Brokerage dropped $17 million on ads in the first three quarters, only to see its visits plunge from 380,000 in July to 171,000 in September and  just 46,000 in December.
    Even Monster.com, which gets high marks for its bold, creative  TV ad campaign in the 1998 Superbowl, didn't get much bang for its $20.6 million in ad spending in the first three quarters of 1999. 
    Its visits held at 2.5 million between July and September and actually plunged to 2.2 million in December, after hitting  a high of 2.8 million in October.
     Nor were new dot.com businesses the only ones to get such sorry results for their ad spending.
     Schwab.com, the online service of the Schwab discount brokerage house, spent $40.8 million over the January-September period last year, making it the third largest dot.com  advertiser, but its visits went from 946,000 in July to just 776,000 in September and 653,000 in October.
    By December, traffic was just back up  to 976,000 again, about where it was at mid-year.
   AOL, which spent $30 million on advertising between January and September, also saw visits slip from 53.4 million in July to 52.4 million in September, only recovering to 53.7 million in December.
    Of the companies sampled, the only big  advertisers who showed significant gains for their efforts were Amazon.com and Ameritrade.com.
    Amazon, which spent $20 million in the first three quarters of last year, saw its visits slip from 11.5 million in July to 11.2 million in September, but  they rose to 15.9 million in December.  Amazon was a heavy advertiser in the last three months of the year, like most retailers.
     Ameritrade spent $36.4 million in the first three quarters.  Its visits went from 416,000 in July to 503,000 in September and 843,000 in December.
     It's hard to decipher much of a trend from the data.  New companies generally didn't see much gain in traffic as a result of their pricey campaigns, but even for established companies like Amazon and AOL, the results were mixed.
    Jack Myers, chief economist with the Myers group says he is not surprised at the results.
    "Unless these companies are trying to impress investors, there's not that much to be gained by these ad campaigns," he says.
    Although usually described as branding campaigns, Myers argues that most of the dot.com companies, with the exception of older names like AOL or Amazon, are not  really brands.
    "A brand has differentiation, relevance, effective communication, continuity, leadership, value and it fulfills expectations," he says.  Most of these companies only manage to hit one or two of these categories. 
    Maybe an Amazon or an AOL hits four or five, and have a brand, but the rest are just brand wannabees.
 Advertising by itself, no matter how edgy or creative, says Myers, is not going to build a brand in a hurry. 
   "They're operating in such a cluttered environment," he says.
 So does that mean a slowdown in dot.com ad spending this year?
    Don't bet on it.  The investor dollars are still pouring in and the list of new companies going public keeps growing.
       Competitive Media Reporting, which supplied the ad spending figures for the first nine months of 1999, says dot.coms spent a total of  $1.37 billion on advertising between January and September, almost four times the $349 million spent over the same period a year earlier. 
      The single biggest category of spending was television--a total of $653 million, or almost half of all advertising spending.  This was followed by newspapers, at $225 million, and radio at  $198 million.
    All these ad spending figures are expected to rise at the same pace this year, effective or not.

-Dave Lindorff covers television and research for Media Life.