Ads for Procter & Gamble Co.'s Olean and Sunny Delight started appearing on the Yahoo site last week, the first official media buys P&G has made on the Web. The marketer caused uproar in the Web publishing business earlier this month when it told sites it would only pay for ads on a cost-per-click basis, instead of the accepted cost-per-impression. Yahoo is the first known site to sell ads to P&G; most publishers interviewed by Ad Age said they would not work on P&G's terms.
Publishers say they can't make money selling ads on a click basis; click rate can be as low as 2% on some sites. P&G and its interactive buying agency, Grey Advertising, New York, say that if Web users simply see an ad, that's not good enough. It must be clicked for the ad to really work.
Yahoo, for its part, declined to comment on terms of its deal with P&G. But industry executives had said Yahoo had agreed to P&G's terms with one condition: that it be allowed to help create the ads so as to maximize the click rate.
