NYT: Marketers Shift Tactics on Web Ads
A website built by MSN for Lexus, the maker of luxury cars, hopes to attract customers by applying the increasingly important dictum of online advertising: make yourself useful.
The site, called Luxury for Living, contains links to Lexus advertisements, but it is dominated by lifestyle information on topics including luxury hotels, high-technology s and farmers' markets. It also contains links to outside sites like Slate.com and MSNBC.com. Hoping to make users feel relaxed and pampered, the site plays music: piano, jazz or "new luxury," the music from Lexus commercials.
The content offerings are intended to keep users on the site without bombarding them with advertisements. But those ads are just a click away, if a user decides to look at them.
In certain respects this is retro, rather than original thinking. Plenty of advertisers have gone down the content provision route, and that includes running microsites on portals. I'm not sure how or why this is considered as new?
