"HALF the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half," said John Wanamaker, the 19th-century US chain-store magnate. Had he lived today, Wanamaker might have found it even trickier to plan a marketing campaign. Online advertising is growing rapidly in importance, yet the vast majority of internet adverts fail to engage web surfers -1000 web-advert exposures usually result in about three "click-throughs".rnInternet users tend to avoid fixing their eyes on anything that looks like advertising - a phenomenon dubbed "banner blindness" says Nidhi Mathur of Hewlett-Packard's research lab in Bangalore, India. That makes it hard to get their attention online. One solution is to go back to print.
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