Guess Who's Seeing Web Traffic Soar: Kraft and Co.
Jack Neff
Advertising Age
December 10, 2007
BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- What's the hottest category
in digital marketing? Package goods.
Yes, you read that right. Staid old supermarket staples,
once scoffed at as laggards in digital media, are
charging online at an unprecedented pace -- and their
efforts are being rewarded: Traffic to industry websites
in the past year has grown twice as fast as the U.S.
internet population.
Unique visitors to package-goods brand websites soared
10% compared with a year ago in the third quarter to
66.4 million, according to data shared exclusively with
Ad Age by ComScore. The tally is double the 5% rise in
the U.S. internet users to 181.9 million.
The traffic increase, according to ComScore, appears to
come primarily from a surge in online display
advertising from package-goods players, who, while
relatively late to embrace the medium, are now coming on
strong.
Mars' Uncle Ben's site, for example, which cracked the
industry's top 10 last quarter, according to ComScore,
did so primarily by using targeted banner ads on
Oprah.com and FoodNetwork.com. They generated nearly 2
million of the 3.6 million visits the site received in
the third quarter. UncleBens.com traffic surged more
than 1,700% from a year ago.
Displaying the goods
While search is also a big driver of traffic to
package-goods sites, as ComScore reported in October,
most of the recent increase has come from online
display, said Carolina Petrini, senior VP-consumer
package goods solutions at ComScore.
"I think 2007 has been a big year overall for CPG," Ms.
Petrini said. "You will see products being advertised on
home pages of major portals, such as Bertolli [a
Unilever brand] or Contadina [Del Monte Foods] on the
Yahoo.com home page. You never saw that before this
year."
Much of the growth comes from food marketers, who
occupied all 10 of the top spots in ComScore's
third-quarter industry scorecard. But that doesn't count
what most likely would have been the industry's most
heavily visited site, Johnson & Johnson's Baby Center,
which ComScore excluded because it's essentially a media
and e-tailing site.
Sure to be controversial, however, is that some of the
biggest and fastest-growing sites are for candy or
heavily sweetened snacks and soft drinks with content
geared mainly toward children. Food marketers who've
largely withdrawn from child-oriented TV programming are
finding plenty of children are willing to follow their
brands to the web.
For example, Millsberry.com, a site featuring games and
ads for such General Mills brands as Fruit Roll-Ups and
Cocoa Puffs cereal, saw an 11% increase in traffic from
last year to nearly 5 million visitors in the third
quarter -- an audience that easily surpasses those of
many individual children's programs.
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Others in the top 10 include the rapidly growing My Coke
Rewards, with purchase-based prizes aimed heavily at
teens; Hersheys.com; Mars' MMs.com; and Candystand, a
site roughly a decade old that has supported Lifesavers
through three corporate owners.
"I think that because of growing public outrage about
advertising to children on television that marketers are
working to find other ways to insinuate their brands
into children's lives," said Susan Linn, co-founder of
the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. "They're
turning to the web and also, I think, increasingly
finding ways to advertise in schools."
Of course, the growth in package-goods sites isn't all
about kids. Top sites also include KraftFoods.com and
sibling NabiscoWorld.com; General Mills'
BettyCrocker.com; and Mars' MyMMs.com, a site used
largely by adults to create customized assortments of
M&M's candies, which saw traffic grow 79% in the past
year behind stepped-up offline and online advertising.
Personal-care and household-products marketers are
stepping up their web investments too. L'Oréal Paris
last week announced a revamped site, lorealparis.com,
from Interpublic Group of Cos.' R/GA, New York,
featuring recommendations for its beauty products and
videos of its stable of celebrity endorsers, with an
online and offline campaign behind it to break in
January.
Buying into digital newsprint
Heavyweights Unilever and Procter & Gamble Co., while
never big run-of-press advertisers in newspapers since
the advent of radio and TV, have stepped up their
advertising on newspapers sites in the past year behind
such brands as Degree for Unilever and DayQuil/NyQuil
and Crest for P&G, notes Jane Newman, senior sales
executive with the Newspaper National Network.
Despite the increases, however, most package-goods
marketers are far from catching up with the general
market. P&G's internet spending as a share of total
measured spending was 2.1% in the first half, up from
1.4% a year ago but still well below the 7.6% average
found by TNS Media Intelligence. Although Unilever spent
5% of its first-half media outlay online, it was
below-average too.