Business-to-Business Internet Marketing, Fourth Edition - Lifecycle ...

The Age of the “e” 19
Internet’s first $1 billion in advertising revenue, according to Reuters,
up from $267 million in 1996. As proof positive of the future, consumer
goods giants took to the Internet in 1997, not just by establishing
top-shelf Web sites, but by aggressively integrating Internet advertising
and electronic commerce initiatives into their promotional marketing
strategies. In 1998, consumer giant Procter and Gamble organized an
unusual Internet marketing summit to elicit ideas for future initiatives.
In 1998 and 1999, e-commerce really hit its stride. There was greatly
increased activity on the consumer side, but the majority of Internetbased
sales have still been generated by businesses selling to businesses.
The successes of the past few years have been nothing short of mindboggling.
Dell Computer (www.dell.com) is just one example of that. By the
end of 1997, Dell was logging $4 million a day from online sales. By
2000, Dell had reportedly achieved ten times that number: $40 million
a day from e-commerce alone. According to the company, online sales
accounted for 25% of Dell’s business by early 1999, and by 2000, half
of Dell’s revenues were from online sales. The majority of Dell’s sales
are business-to-business.
Networking giant Cisco Systems (www.cisco.com) had already established
an industry-leading e-commerce benchmark by the end of 1997,
averaging $9 million per day of online sales. That translated into 40%
of the company’s total annual revenue being generated via the Web,
even in those “early days” of e-commerce.
Intranets and Extranets
B-to-b companies are not just driving electronic commerce. They quickly
went beyond Internet marketing usage alone, creating intranets and
extranets, perhaps two of the most-used words in the trade press in
their current reporting of the Internet.
Both intranets and extranets are now becoming populated with
marketing initiatives. Technically an Internet-enabled internal network
intended primarily for employee usage, an intranet is a media channel
in and of itself—a very targeted one, in fact. Imagine if a Fortune 500
company were to allow advertising on its intranet—so that its employees
would receive promotional messages from select providers of products
and services. What if that same company were to actively promote