Dayparts, at long last, have come to internet advertising.
    CBS MarketWatch.com appears to be the first major web site to begin selling online ads tailored to specific hours of the day.
    Its first campaign, from Anheuser-Busch, is running on Fridays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in all U.S. time zones.
    To date, advertisers have approached the internet as a medium that’s open for business 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
    But increasingly web experts believe this view ignores the fact that internet usage patterns vary widely throughout the course of the day.
    "To be sure, people are going online at specific times during the day to do specific things," says Dave Evans, GSD&M’s head internet producer. "So the concept of targeting online advertising towards specific dayparts is valid.
   "CBS MarketWatch.com might get a lot of attention during the lunch hour when people are on their break, while Atom Films might not see a surge in users until after three, when kids get out of school," Evans says.
    Mike Potter, creative and production director at MFP Interactive, agrees.
    "Any time you can more precisely define where an ad is going, it's going to be a more valuable proposition for an advertiser," notes Potter.
    On financial sites like MarketWatch, users can be expected to log on at predictable times—for example, as the markets close to see how their portfolios have fared.
    According to Scot McLernon, MarketWatch.com’s executive vice president for sales, MarketWatch also sees a spike in traffic in the morning shortly before trading opens.
    "We realized that what we were missing was daypart elements, which capitalize on consumers when they’re most likely to make a purchase," says McLernon.
    The introduction of daypart advertising comes at the same time as an overall site redesign for MarketWatch.
    The Anheuser-Busch campaign, specifically for its Budweiser and O’Doul’s brands, debuted last Friday.
    "In the afternoon when you’re driving around, you’ll hear radio ads about, say, McDonald’s—an effort to get you to start thinking about having a cheeseburger," says McLernon. "So this is the way we presented it to Budweiser: Let’s catch them before happy hour."
    The Budweiser ads will appear at around 3 p.m. in New York, but they will not pop up in the other time zones until the clocks there roll over to 3 p.m.
    To achieve this regional targeting, MarketWatch uses Doubleclick’s DART ad-serving technology. DART detects where the internet service provider is based and releases ads accordingly. If the user is logged on to an ISP in New York, and it’s 3:00 in the afternoon, the ad will be served. When the clock rolls over to 3:00 in Denver, Denver MarketWatch users will see the ad.
    Some buyers wonder whether the technology is quite so precise as MarketWatch believes it to be.
    Mark McLaughlin, a partner at Fuel North America, notes that people often log on through their distant corporate servers in vastly different time zones.
    Also, he says, large internet service providers such as America Online often route users through its Virginia headquarters, regardless of whether or not they dialed up via a local number. And server farms tend to be located on the West and East coasts.
    Still, McLernon of MarketWatch defends the technology, even with such shortcomings.
    "It’s not perfect science," he admits. "Let’s say that if I’m sitting in New York, I dial in to a server in California. You’re going to miss once or twice, but 99 percent of the time you’re going to hit it correctly."  
    The MarketWatch Budweiser ads will also appear in another new format, in which the word "Budweiser" will appear over and over, written in faint text, behind the rest of the page's content. This "wallpaper" ad format is subtle, bordering on being subliminal.
    Ads on MarketWatch in general reach an audience that is 75 percent male, with household incomes of $100,000 a year. The site draws 9 million monthly unique users.
    Since MarketWatch sees a morning traffic jump, morning daypart ads for coffee and orange juice would be a logical extension of the online daypart model, and restaurant chains could advertise before lunch, McLernon says. 
    MarketWatch is in talks with the makers of such products, although no companies besides Anheuser-Busch have signed on yet.
    According to McLernon, MarketWatch is charging Anheuser-Busch a premium for the ads as part of a larger sponsorship package.
    Daypart advertising, he predicts, will soon spread across CBS/Viacom properties.
    The trend could likely spread across the web.
    GSD&M’s Evans notes that the internet has much in common with interactive TV, in that users control what content they see and when they see it.
    "With TiVo, for example, viewers can watch ‘primetime’ shows at any time," he says. "All of this de-emphasizes classic primetime and shifts toward daypart importance."
    With that in mind, Evans endorses internet daypart advertising but cautions against getting too specific about times when placing ads online, since internet surfing is driven by consumer behavior rather than network programming.
    "There’s no reason to chase content at precisely 7:30 p.m. when it is available at any time," says Evans.
    But not all buyers are convinced that the internet will be sliced and diced by advertiser by time of day. 
    McLaughlin, for one, says that finding users in the right mind-set is far more important to delivering a successful message then what time of day they happen to pick to shop for something or get information.
    "I don’t really need time zone targeting to accomplish that," he says.

- Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life.

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