Tyler Townsend, a digital media manager who plans online advertising for travel clients at Ypartnership, an agency in Orlando, had $150,000 to spend on behalf of a Caribbean island’s visitors bureau. And this client did not care about branding — it wanted action.
So Mr. Townsend, who once might have made a simple buy on a site like Yahoo, created a complex campaign, which ran in March. He bought ads on Budget Travel, and he bought out Lonely Planet’s home page for a week. He used custom ad networks that included travel-themed sites, and another that would put the ads only on high-end sites.
Last year, Mr. Townsend said, many clients were happy to spend money just to raise awareness. Since January, however, “everyone’s retail-oriented. They want as many clicks for the dollar as possible,” he said.
So far, the threat of a recession has not slowed the migration of ad dollars to the Internet — as Google’s strong results showed on Thursday, when it reported a 30 percent jump in net income for its first quarter. But as Mr. Townsend’s campaign suggests, the slowing economy might be changing where those ad dollars are being spent.
Increasingly, marketers are looking to ad networks, which sell display advertising across groups of Web sites. Some networks offer targeted advertising; others, called vertical ad networks, include sites that focus on one subject, like travel or sports.
Their growth could mean a lower share of advertising for portals like AOL and particularly for Yahoo, which is particularly strong in traditional display advertising. (Yahoo will report its quarterly earnings on Tuesday.)